Reichenbach: A Love Story
by SimplyElymas
Summary: My edited NaNoWriMo 2006 novel. In Greek, there are three words for love, but John Watson does not know these words, and is afraid to learn them. Entails breaking of Leviticus, passages 18:22 and 20:13. In other words, slash.
1. An Explanation

**An Explanation**

_**by Maxwell Gabriel Neiman the Second**_

In finally publishing the manuscript I have had in my ownership for so many years, I have been apprehensive. When I first proposed the notion of these diaries to the world of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, I was laughed at. Recently, however, when I them to some of our foremost experts on the Master, they saw that I do indeed have claim to one of the last unknown Watsonian manuscripts. Abruptly, their attitude changed from amusement into fear, and finally into anger.

I realize that in true followers of the Master the notion of Holmes having any sort of romance creates a strong visceral reaction. I was once of this opinion myself. However, the papers that have come before me are without a doubt authentic, and contain a tale that, as Holmes himself writes, is without a doubt a love story.

My discovery of these papers came in 2001, when I traveled to the Master's house in Sussex so that I might complete some vital research for my newest book. (I have since forgotten that book in favor of proving the truth of this new manuscript.) The house is now, of course, and was then closed off from tours by order of the Watson estate, which had inherited the house and grounds upon Holmes's death. However, when I made rather a nuisance of myself by sending several long letters, I was able to explore the house under strict supervision by an escort.

These papers, I found buried in what was once the back garden, safeguarded in a small metal chest covered in rotting leather. On the leather of the lid was engraved in fading gilt letters, "To Doctor John Hamish Watson upon the Christmas of 1917, from his friend Sherlock Holmes." Within, I found two books of sorts. One was bound in linen, likewise rotting from age, and had plainly been taken care of far more that the other, which was leather bound, also rotting, and had pages spilling out every which way. The linen bound proved to be a genuine Watsonian manuscript, the handwriting if not the style corroborating in every way with the good Doctor's usual manner. The leather bound, however, was something even more precious and rare. Unlike the Watsonian manuscript, which was written in plain black ink on plain white paper, the leather bound seemed to have been written rather haphazardly on whatever came to hand. There were restaurant bills with scribbling on the backs. There was a piece of what appeared to be royal stationery from some unknown kingdom, and there were types of ink ranging from the very shoddy black British ink the writer seemed to have preferred to the ink used for Japanese calligraphy.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. It was a manuscript by the Master, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, himself. Imagine my surprise. Imagine the far greater surprise of my escort when he returned from his bathroom break to find me digging up the back garden. The manuscript seems to date from 1891, the time of Holmes's supposed death, and although itdoes recount events that happened almost a decade previously, it also gives us some insight into the time he spent wandering the world during the so called lost years. The Watsonian manuscript also dates from 1891, and follows much the same pattern of reminiscence.

I realize the controversy that this new revelation will inspire among my fellow scholars of the Master. However, I believe the advice Holmes gives us in his first entry is perfectly sound. You must at least take this tale to be true, and whether you turn away from the doctor and detective or revere them all the more for the moral adversity they faced together, you must read it if you recognize them as two human beings.

We scholars idealize Sherlock Holmes, naturally, and so we should, for he was a hero, and remains to us a hero. Too often in the world, however, heroes are denied their humanity, and if we care for him, we must not deny him that.

On the first page of the linen bound Watsonian manuscript is the word "Reichenbach," in the Doctor's distinctive handwriting. It is unclear if he meant it as a title, for it is certain he never meant the manuscript to be published Clearly, however, Holmes believed it was a title of sorts, for beside it, as though to add a subtitle, he seems to have written the words, "A Love Story." It is perhaps not the sort of phrase we would accredit to Holmes, but the handwriting is undoubtedly his own. For this reason I have given the manuscript this name, as I believe it was intended to some extent, if not by the doctor, than certainly by Holmes. I have also organized the entries into chapters, which I have taken the liberty of titling. After all, a love story is a love story, and should not be a purely scholarly venture. I believe any who peruse these writings with an open mind will be struck by the unrelentingly honest and human quality of the sentiments expressed herein. In other words, this is not only a document to be analyzed and puzzled over by stodgy old Oxbridge dons. It is a love story. Take it as it is.


	2. Supplication

**From the Hiatus Era Writings of Sherlock Holmes**

**Chapter One**

**Supplication**

Meiringen. Evening of the third of May, 1891.1

Outside, I can hear the water dripping monotonously from the rain gutters. Every drop sounds like a cruel, choking laugh. I am going to die tomorrow. Last night the storm roared over us, incongruous and frightening for springtime, leaving Meiringen shaken and wet. I am going to die tomorrow, and I am afraid. My fear does not stem, however, from the prospect of dying. I am afraid of the moment that will come before I die. Will my life be reflected in that moment, laid bare before me, every mistake recalled, each flaw scrutinized? I do not know. I cannot know. Some years past, I formulated a theory based on a rose, and with this as proof, I believed in a benevolent God. It was quite basic. Simplistic. Indeed, instinctual. Roses are superfluous, yet pleasant, and therefore proof of a deity's benevolence. Yet some say that proof of God is the surest denial, for proof denies faith, and without faith, God is nothing.

Do benevolent deities judge? Would it not be ironic if, having sent so many men to the dock of the English court, I myself was sent to some far greater dock in the court of the divine? If I swear my queen and country, with my right hand on the Bible, I will have to tell them the truth. What questions will they ask me? Questions on morals? On ethics? On chivalry? On love? On respecting one's superiors? On believing one even has superiors?

I believe they will ask me only of love. It is the only thing that puzzles me. Yes, puzzles. Confounds and confuses and utterly leaves me gasping like a fish. Such is my first confession. I simply do not understand it. And here, here is my second. I have never been loved, or been in love with another, and I believe this only makes my sin greater. I cannot plead that it was love that caused this sin – it was not. If it was anything, it was loneliness, the high and cold isolation that comes with being a man in our age of calling cards and gentlemen's clubs. And what am I, then?

_A sodomite. Not an aesthete, or an artist, or even an invert. Simply a sodomite._

So there it is. Do not turn away. Do not avert your eyes. Do you hear me? Do not turn away. You know me. I am Mr. Sherlock Holmes, after all. And you have read of me, in my dear friend's stories, in the Strand. I am still he. I am only the same man, afraid.

I know you are disgusted. So am I. You are sickened, disgusted, revolted, and most of all horrified, at my admittance of my crime. But rest assured that your misery, your disgust, your revulsion, is not one tenth of mine. I have sometimes considered that criminals ought never to be punished at all, simply left to stew in the guilt of their own actions. But this is not possible, is it? So will you hear this for me? Hear this because I have taken pen and ink in hand, and I have made what Herculean efforts it takes to commit the truth to paper. This is no tale of gossip and a slim young green carnation gentleman.2 This is a true story, and you must hear it. Or if, the truth of it is not enough, hear it because I am a man, only a man, and I too bleed. Hath not a Jew eyes?3 I am only a man, and you must hear my story. But if that still will not convince you, then hear it because it is I. It is only Sherlock Holmes again. There is a fascinating, somewhat sordid, horrible, unique problem that has come before me now, and you have stayed with me through these before, you invisible reader whose eyes will never touch this page.

Hear me because I am afraid, and lonely, and there is a dull ache in my head and in my heart.

I am going to die tomorrow. There is no other way. His agents are closing their nets on me. I know the feeling I have now, the horrid frantic panic closing in on me. It is the feeling I hope to inspire in the criminals I apprehend.

There is an ache of exhaustion behind my eyes, but I cannot return to our bed. I cannot look at him and know it may be the last time I do so. I simply refuse to subject myself to that brand of pain.

1 The day before Holmes's supposed death at the falls of Reichenbach. This no doubt explains Holmes's insistence that he will die tomorrow – he seems to anticipate it.

2 A slang term for a homosexual male in Victorian England. The wearing of the green carnation in ones lapel button represented homosexuality. This was popularized by Oscar Wilde, though it began in Paris.

3 A reference to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, specifically one of Shylock's famous speeches about anti-Semitism.


	3. The Sons of Ahura Mazda

**Chapter Two**

**The Sons of Ahura Mazda**

Meiringen, the fourth of May, 1891.

You will excuse me if my narrative possesses a certain disjointed quality. I fully expected to be dead by now, and yet by some peculiar circumstance I seem to have survived. It was certain that I should die. When a man such as my late adversary, sinks his sharp teeth into one, he is distinctly unlikely to let go unless he has torn the flesh from the bone, or until he himself is dead. And now he is indeed dead, but I think he may have taken something of myself with him. Still, he is gone, and I ought to celebrate, in my own quiet way. After all, this does mean I have won.

What an intensely amusing thought.

I have won, haven't I? How completely awful. I have proved myself the superior brain. That, of course, was always the point. That has been the point of my entire life, proving my own inarguable brilliance. A beautiful enormous contest in which thought upon any other subject is impossible if survival is to be retained. How many times I imagined that final conflict! The culmination of so much!

It was, in reality, no more intellectually exciting than playing chess. And not with an opponent of any particular brilliance, either. There was no real contest, there on the falls, except for that which small boys practice in their eternal habit of vying for superiority. There were only flying limbs and the spray of the falls and then the sight of him, my eternal opponent, falling down into the roaring water, a tiny, horribly small and insignificant spot of black on the white.

I can feel a deep and awful coldness in the pit of my stomach. I feel as though perhaps I have died. I was so absolutely certain that I would. His agents were all around. And he wanted my death on his hands alone, and I knew there could be no way out. Perhaps it would be better if I had died. A better ending for the story my dear friend will no doubt make of it. I can see the illustration now. The Professor and I falling, grappling in ultimate and noble confrontation, hero and villain, moral and corrupt, good and evil. The difficulty, of course, lies in determining which is which.

As it is, of course, he will still write that story. The truth makes no particular difference in sensationalism. He will write it, and I will be an unwilling martyr, both eratz and living. How horrid. But it hardly matters. I do not intend to inform him that I am alive.

I have often threatened, half in jest, to write my own chronicles of cases. Now I suppose I must, because if I have no proof of what is true, I am not certain I shall believe it myself.

You will have to pardon me if this story is not what you expect of me. It is not a crime or a mystery in the way the world understands these things. I am afraid that it is, for all intents and purposes, a love story. _A love story! _I hear you moan. _How miserable! And didn't the man just say he'd never had anything to do with love? What, have you lost your mind? _Not really, I reply. I'm merely tired. Exhausted, even. I am bored, frankly, of my profession, and I am taking something of a mental holiday in telling this tale, even if the holiday does only tie me into inextricable knots. Besides, love stories do not end happily in any case. I have no obligation towards the outcome of this tale.

So. The falls of Reichenbach, and what transpired there. If you are only just joining us, ladies and gentlemen, having missed my dear friend's tales of me in the Strand magazine, allow me to assist you. Perhaps you have heard the name of the late – at last, he is the late - Professor Moriarty. I doubt it, however. He was, of course, a genius of crime. He was the sort of man, in short, who would not only endorse Solomon's decision to cut the baby in half, but volunteer for the duty himself.

Duality has been a part of human moral thought since the followers of the prophet Zoroaster, and their philosophy regarding the two sons of Ahura Mazda, one good, one evil. Jesus and Judas share space in the annals of human mythology with Zeus and Hades, Cain and Abel, Satan and God. And If I may flatter myself, Moriarty and I had much the same rapport. Always aware of each other but never truly meeting in battle, we shared a certain divine disrespect. Many years of being in directly conflicting professions, he being an organizer of crimes, I being a deterrent of the same, had brought the matter to a head. His agents were quite determined to find me and kill me, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. But what truly made me proud was that they soon stopped chasing me, and then I knew: Moriarty wished to dispose of me himself. It does not make most men feel incredibly proud and happy when they hear of their impending murder by the most ingenious criminal in England, but then, I am used to being the exception in all respects.

We met at Meiringen, at the falls of Reichenbach. There is absolutely nothing noteworthy about this place save the enormous waterfall and the fact that the people there claim to have invented meringue. For this glorious nondescript quality it possesses, I chose Meiringen as my hiding place. Naturally, he found me. However, he picked a singularly inconvenient time to find me. Namely, while the good doctor and I, having heard of the remarkable wonder that was Reichenbach, decided to pay the famous landmark a visit.

The moment we received the note, I knew. There was a woman at our hotel, it said, an Englishwoman, dying, and much in need of an English doctor. Of course Watson believed it. How could he not have? The concern on his face was genuine, no matter who for, and it was particularly remarkable in that he had never even seen the woman with his own two eyes. In anyone else, I would call it foolishness. In him, although I knew that it was foolish, there was a nagging part of me that told me it was faith, and that I was the fool to believe it foolish.

"Shall I go?" he asked me, his brow furrowed with worry. (For me? For the woman? No matter.)

"Oh yes," I said, my voice light. "We, after all, cannot leave our countrywomen in distress."

"Nor our countrymen," he amended, clapping my shoulder. "I shouldn't want to return to find you with a bullet in your chest."

I smiled sardonically at him. How many times I have looked at him like that! Peculiar to think that this time would be the last. "No, I am sure you shouldn't. But for heaven's sake, my dear fellow, go on. My death by mathematics professor is distinctly unlikely to occur here, of all places." _Which,_ I thought privately, _is precisely why it will_.

"If you are sure you will be all right?"

I shrugged his hand off of me. His warmth was too much now, now when what I needed to think of was confrontation and cold fury. "I shall be quite all right. After all, I always have been."

He stood before me, suspended in amber, his mouth half open as though about to speak, and I looked at him for what might be the last time.

John Watson is an ordinary man. Brown hair and moustache, precisely clipped, a habit left from his army days. Likewise, precise and perhaps a little vain in habits of dress, but never impractical, or, heaven help us, an advocate of dress reform. Well built, possessing significant physical strength. Expressive face, though possessing of the characteristic stoicism of the British male. There is, however, a certain softness and delicacy in the curve of the neck and jaw that belies his fragility. A slight limp in the left leg, hardly noticeable unless one is paying close attention, and a stiffness in the left shoulder, both also souvenirs of his military service.

He is a man whom I have observed at length, and there is no better subject for observation. He is clear as plate glass. It is not that he is simple. I have heard him termed so, and I cannot express to what degree I disagree. They do not hand out medical degrees free in tobacco tins here in London, nor does a man without strength of character live on of his own volition after surviving the distinctly uncomfortable Battle of Maiwand. You may believe me when I say with perfect sincerity that I have been the better for his company. He is – was – a foil to me. A man of perfect, honest Victorian values to put my Bohemian back against. I am enormously fond of him.

My smile lost its cynical quality. I could not help it. His worry was too real. "I shall keep the guide with me, if that is what you are about to ask. Go on. It shan't be long, in any case."

He turned up the path, and I put my back against a rock to rest. _So. _It had come to this. I shut my eyes.

"Holmes!"

I turned in the direction of the voice. It was Watson, of course, not a little way up the path, calling over the roar of the falls.

"Yes?" I called back.

He shouted something to me, but over the noise of the water, I could not hear it.

I did not, would not watch him go. I stared fixedly down into the crevice, but instead I could only see his back, in its familiar brown overcoat, going further and further away.

I turned to the guide. "Well," I said, "I admit I did not realize at first whose pay you were under."

He grinned in response. I do not believe he spoke English, but the message of my words was clear. Poor boy. Crime is the worst cancer on the young. I pitied him.

And there was my adversary, coming quietly up the path like the good academic he had always been.

Moriarty looked much shorter, here. Short and hunched and not particularly alarming. He still bore that distinctly disquieting resemblance to a reptile, but he had changed from poisonous adder into a garden snake. His head bobbed on his neck as though he were frightened that I might fix him in one spot and put a bullet through his head. (He was right. Had I a pistol, he would have been a dead man. But I had chosen a different method for our final confrontation.)

He nodded to the boy, who took it as his cue to leave, then turned to face me. Some men alarm with their sheer power of presence, not because they assert it, but because they are absolutely certain that if they desired it, they could have any man who displeased them removed from the face of God's green earth.

"Hello, sir," said Professor Moriarty.

"Well, sir." I nodded to him. "I must tell you, you were expected."

Suddenly, I could see all his weaknesses, and I wondered if he could see mine. "Oh, really?" He replied, his wrinkled face crinkling in indignation. "Well. Then you are armed."

The smile I felt come to my face was a sad one. Almost rueful. It was really too bad, for Sherlock Holmes to lose all his cocksure certainty now, when the test finally came. Quite a shame. With that same look of rueful happiness on my face, I held open my overcoat, to show that I had no weapons, then slipped it off and lay it on a nearby boulder. "No. I am not armed, precisely because I knew you would come. I want to settle the matters between us on our own, without the assistance of other men. Or other weapons."

He looked at me for what seemed a long time, and then he laughed. There was a dishonest quality to his laugh. Some deductions are made on fact, some are made on instinct. Those made on instinct are not, I must assert, guesses. They are pieces of intellectual knowledge left over from the time when human beings were little more than animals, and I have found them as crucially useful to me as any of my chemical researches or observations of the pipes and walking sticks of men. And I know a dishonest laugh when I hear one.

It was only one laugh, more like a choke or the crack of a whip than an expression of mirth, and it echoed among the rocky crags like a disquieting thought. I dislike being the object of amusement. His strength seemed to have returned. I shook myself. Now was certainly not the time for fanciful ideas.

"Those are some amusing ideas you have, sir," he said. There was a bitter merriment to his tone that disquieted me more than anger would have. "Some very amusing ideas. Do you think that I am the green knight, and you are Sir Gawaine?"

"No. I do not. Do you?"

"You are quite pert, sir."

I waved one hand. The criminal tendency to talk to his opponent as though they were sitting in a parlor together never fails to fascinate me. "So am I occasionally told."

"Well," Moriarty said, his mouth twisted into a furiously sardonic grin that reminded me far too much of my own, "You are very young."

I almost laughed at this myself, but then I realized the veracity of his words. In comparison to him, I was indeed quite young. A peculiar thought, but perfectly true.

"You have all these dramatic ideals. I have heard about your penchant for the theatrical, sir, and I suppose, that is why you chose this stage for your finale." Behind him, Reichenbach thundered, giving his words a ringing underscore of truth.

"Or _your_ finale, sir."

"That is besides the point." He stared up at the falls. "They look almost like a photograph, do they not, sir? The black rocks and the white water."

"It's fitting, sir," said I. I felt my age then, as though I looked at the gray suffusing his hair, and the obvious arthritis in his hands. Shaking myself, I glanced down at my own hands. They were all too different from his scholarly ones. My hands were pale and callused and stained with chemicals, but they did not shake, and I was not afraid.

Without my coat, I was beginning to feel very cold.

"Sir, have you any missive to leave for your friends before things come to a head, if I may utilize colloquialism?"

"No."

"You are so certain you will prevail?"

There was a gust of wind, and I came near to shivering. "No," I said, "not certain."

"You do of course realize that the contest is hardly fair. You are young."

"So you keep saying."

"And you are strong.

"I am in no position to deny this."

"You could have been a boxer, you are an excellent swordsman, and apparently an expert on some obscure form of Japanese martial art which I have never in my life heard of, and therefore suspect is fabrication."

My smile lost its ruefulness at the thought of this particular ruse. "Ah, yes. Baritsu. Yes, it is utter fabrication, or if it by some odd extension of reality is in fact real, I have never practiced it. My associate is an excellent perpetuator of fictions alarming to the criminal mind."

"Do you mean to say that you invent these stories so that the underworld will –" There was a sudden light in his eyes, and I recognized for a moment the same great mind that had produced works such as his treatise on the binomial theorem, and that had orchestrated the perfect murder of Douglas Birlstone1, but then he remembered. We were adversaries. In the beginning, I too had forgotten this. I had thought, in what Moriarty would term my idealism, that perhaps I could turn the man from his crime. Such a mind! I admit, I thought of him almost affectionately when I first became aware of him. An opponent, and a good one, is the greatest gift to the true artist. But soon I knew his kind. He was a villain in the most hideous sense.

Moriarty saw the resolve in my face. "Your decision is made?" He inquired. "There is one other option."

And of course, there was. For everything, there is an alternative course. And there is no one in the world more aware of all the forks in the road of our lives than myself. But my course I had chosen long ago. I would do good works, and good works alone. "My decision," said I, "remains firm. Has yours wavered?"

"My resolve, sir, is as firm as yours."

"Excellent. An opponent uncertain of his footwork is always a bore in the ring."

"As you say." He began to remove his coat, then stopped. "But you wish to leave no missive? No message? No, 'if you are reading this, I have passed on?' It is a courtesy I am always careful to grant, and I have never had it rejected."

I paused. I knew he was lying. He had granted that courtesy to perhaps a select few. Those he might have even become fond of, had they been on his side of the great game. I was confident in my chances, certainly, but Moriarty had never failed to surprise. Perhaps. If I lost. I shut my eyes for a moment, and simply thought.

If I lost. Hadn't I thought this through? If I lose. Then I have failed. And then. . .

The dead possess no obligations towards the living. And in any case. Better for my associate and partner to receive no notification than what he would receive otherwise – a terse, awkwardly worded note full of false eloquence and understatement, that could never tell him what was in my mind. (Or heart. But I refused to think of these matters now.)

"Sir? Will you take advantage of my courtesy? To notify your associate?" He was smiling now, mocking me. _He knew. _ Of course he knew. How could be not have known?

I ran one hand over my face, more in exasperation than fear. "I must ask you, for purely practical reasons, what caused your revelation regarding my associate."

"Silences are more telling than speech," said Professor Moriarty, "and he keeps on insisting in his writing that you have no emotions. Methinks the doctor doth protest too much."

I did not bother to correct the quotation.2 Plainly, his surveillance had been more direct than I had imagined. "May I ask what was the final catalyst in your realization?"

"You are more clumsy around him." Moriarty was almost smirking now, like a small child who knew of another boy's guilt. "Far more clumsy. Sherlock Holmes does not brush his hand over another's reaching for the doorknob. Sherlock Holmes does not fall into someone when he trips. Not, of course, unless Sherlock Holmes has another motive for such contact. Indeed," the increasingly appalling professor added smugly, "it was not so much your actions as the doctor's corresponding reactions. How many times have you remarked that he is as clear to see through as a pane of glass! How right you are, sir! He is clarity itself. But do not worry. I have taken a special interest. I doubt anyone else realizes, your estimable brother accepted. You needn't fret over it."

"Being about to attempt my murder, sir, you are hardly in position to tell me not to fret." It was difficult to keep the anger out of my voice, and he heard it there.

"Anxious to get to the fight? I do not blame you. There, at least, you will have the upper hand."

The tactic, frankly, was unworthy of him, and I said as much. "Childish, sir, very childish. Do you imagine goading me will produce such profound disorientation?"

"I imagine nothing."

"That, sir," I retorted, "is why I shall win."

I do not care to tell of what followed. I am not a violent man by nature, and the professor was, for Heaven's sake, an academic first and foremost. What was done had to be done, and done well, and done quickly.

I stood on the precipice, shaking with fear and exertion, my hair lying limp against my forehead from sweat, and watched him fall, like an inkblot on the water's bright froth. I heard him, too, until he was gone, an echoing, eerie animal sound. I am not to forget that sound, not only because it marked the second time I have ever killed a man, but because it marked the loss of a rather large amount of my business.

I stared down into the churning purgatory of black rock and white spray long after Moriarty could no longer be seen or heard. Mechanically pulling on my overcoat, I imagined falling with him. Spray wetting our furiously terrified faces, rocks raking away at us as we fell past them, we would have made a classically pleasing pair indeed for Mr. Paget's illustrations. But only a very few of us stay on the edge when our demons have fallen to their death. I do not know if my predilection to stay alive is bravery or cowardice. Whatever it may be, my next action was far more cowardly.

I stood, knowing the doctor would arrive back soon, from his false errand to the equally false English lady, and I thought of the play the professor had misquoted before his death. _Hamlet._ A play about a man trying desperately to make a choice, paralyzed by indecision. And then his indecision pays off and he kills the wrong man. I was too smart for my own good. I knew the price of indecision. I knew everything.

Oh, I wanted to stay, to wait for my friend, to look at him and smile and tell him it was over, that we could go home. But I knew it was not over. If I returned to London – wonderful London! How familiar and perfect it seemed from this far vantage point! – I would not last the week, not with Moriarty's gang still living, and nor would the doctor. It was time to escape. Time to disappear for a little while. Besides, it would be better this way, to run for a while away from the unadvisable behavior I had been engaging in.

_But if we both ran, then we could run forever._ There were countries without the Act of '62.3 And wouldn't that be the life I had wished for, sometimes? In the morning, when the sun had not yet risen, and I would light a candle so as not to wake him with the brightness of the gas, and I would read until he woke, not needing to even glance in his direction, knowing he would still be there when the sun rose. That was the life I had wanted. Simple. Sure. Or it would have been simple and sure, had I the strength to pursue it.

Instead, I told myself I was running not from my friend but from my enemies, and I fled, like a coward, like a traitor, like a fool.

But I left him a letter, more of a note, really, pinned under the cigarette case he had given me two Christmases past. (I have never cared for holidays, but he always has, and we reached a compromise by giving each other small, practical, nondescript gifts. A warm coat, a walking stick, and once, a small tintype of the two of us, inscribed, "The Agency. Est. 1881.")

The missive told of my death. It was really the only suitable goodbye.

1 A man whose murder Moriarty orchestrated, or helped to orchestrate. This was chronicled by the good Doctor Watson in a case study entitled, appropriately and biblically enough, "The Valley of Fear."

2 The correct word order for the quotation is, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

3 A piece British legislation forbidding sodomy, conspiracy to commit sodomy, prostitution, abortion, and various other practices considered sexually unhealthy.


	4. The Man Atop the Hill

**Chapter Three**

**The Man Atop the Hill**

I found Colonel Sebastian Moran huddled by a pile of boulders. He was nursing a broken leg. The once proud big game hunter's countenance was significantly spoiled by his sniveling demeanor. I did not expect to see him there, and for a moment recoiled in shock and fear, but like the lion with the thorn in his paw and the mouse dexterous enough to remove it, I soon saw that my adversary was in too much pain to pose any great threat to me.

"Hello," said I, my voice as even as it could be.

One baleful, malevolent eye rose out of the miasma of his black overcoat to look at me. He did not speak. He barely moved. A cigarette, extinguished in the accident that must have broken his leg, lay a few feet from one of his fists. His knuckles were bright white, clenched tight against the pain.

"Has misfortune befallen you, Colonel?"

"Yes." He said no more than that. No doubt it was all he could manage, what with all the pain he must have been in. "Fell. Tripped. Over the rocks. When I saw him. When I saw you – you – you -"

"Indirectly caused the death of your associate."

"Indirectly the devil's black arsehole. It was never indirect. I saw with my own eyes. Pushed him. You. You pushed him off. The. Off the. The falls. You."

Obviously, the Colonel was having some difficulty forming his sentences. I moved a few steps away, my shoes making loud echoes on the stony ground, when he called out in the guttural voice of the grieved.

"Don't think you're playing at any easy game. I'll. We'll. We'll get our own back. We always do. We always have. How do you think we were around so bloody long?"

I whipped around to glare at him. "I know exactly how you were around 'so bloody long,' as you so attractively term it. You sat arrogantly on the backs of desperate people. So much is plain. And I do not plan to stay in Britain long enough for your despicable people to get their equally despicable 'own back.' I am taking a much deserved holiday." _If, of course_, I considered privately, in the ironic way I tend to think when my fortunes run towards the bad, _one considers holiday to mean self imposed near permanent exile from the people and places that give you the most happiness of anything in the world._

"I fell when I saw my friend fall," said Moran, and coughed into the sleeve of his already filthy black coat. "You're running off from your friend without leaving word." His face tightened with the pain, but kept on. "Without so much as a wink over your shoulder. think you're really dead. At least we've heart enough to think of our Professor's loss."

That gave me pause. "It is no loss. It is the law's gain."

"Which essentially equates itself with our loss."

"Sir, you seem to grow more and more articulate and less and less mad with pain every time you get at a bit more of the upper hand."

"It is an old habit."

"Then so is my habit of leaving behind the ones I care for."

"And do you care for him?"

"That is none of your affair."

"Oh, but it is. _Journey's end in lover's meetings__1_after all. Will you ever come back? If you will, it will be for him."

"You are mistaken. If ever I return to the city I once was privileged to call my home, it will be for no one other than myself."

"Returning to London for oneself? I doubt it. Not unless you are an utter madman. Why go back? Hideous and colorless, full of fog and men who walk quickly ahead, looking devoutly at the ground…only a madman would go back of his own free will, not while the lushly hedonistic shores of the continent loom in beckoning glory. And are you a madman, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"

"I have been called so," I sighed, with the air of a parent dealing with an exasperating child. "Since I was rather small."

Moran finally raised his head all the way up, squatting there like a dreadful dwarf, misshapen and homely. There was a livid cut over one cheekbone, presumably likewise garnered in his shocked tumble. Without this disfiguration, he might have been noble in appearance, but now the handsome face was haggard with pain and – grief? Could it be grief? How could it be possible? Grief for his terrible master? Perhaps for his empire. But not for the man himself. It could not be grief for the man himself, or rather, for the monster himself. Could it? After all, what have I ever known of real human grief, for all that I have been in situations normally conducive to it?

"At least," Moran was saying, "I have the common human decency to cry out and fall in tragic surprise when I see one of the greatest geniuses of the age die by another's hand. What you have caused is an enormous and horrible tragedy, even more so than the death of any man. A man such as that, his life is sacred, you know, sir…And you have not even the conscience to stay and regret it properly."

"Life is sacred, you say? What about the men you have killed? What of Douglas Birlstone, whose death the professor so magnificently brought about? What of _my _intended death? If his death was tragic, the genius of crime that he was, then would my death not be so equally?"

Moran shrugged as best he could. "Some of us are exempt from moral law."

"Then, purely for your own purposes, you may consider Sherlock Holmes to be among that number."

I turned on my heel and started away, distraught enough to for once trust in the local authorities to bring him in, but Moran called me back once more. Still slightly curious over this man's warped moral standards, I turned to face him again.

"Help me," he said simply.

I feared my ears had finally given way to the waterfall's constant pounding, and I was truly losing my hearing. "I beg your pardon, sir?"

"Help me."

I stared incredulously at him for a few suspended seconds, then dryly provided him with the only possible answer. "No."

"Help me."

"Of course not. That," I said with elaborate slowness, "would be a very foolish thing to do."

"For me, it would be a foolish thing to do, you mean."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, it would be foolish for me." Moran tried to rise, but pain welled up in his face once more and he slumped back down again. "It would be extremely, benightedly, ridiculously foolish. And for you to help me can do nothing but help you."

"Elaborate, Moran."

"Yes. I shall. If you assist me, you will only do me a disservice by turning my allies against me. If they hear you have helped me, they will assume I desire to make good on the debt I owe you."

"Ah. I see. Our of curiosity, if you did owe me a debt, would you pay it?"

Moran looked at me as though I were an utter fool. "No, of course not. Don't be ridiculous." I supposed I should have expected that. "But the point, Mr. Holmes, at which I am attempting to get, is that I am offering you a favor. With myself up and about, causing havoc and threatening lives, you have an excuse to stay away."

"What makes you believe that I desire to stay away?"

"_Journeys end in lover's meetings, _Mr. Holmes. Some lovers do not wish to meet their counterparts. Or at least not after a good long time." He looked devilishly at me. So. He knew as well.

"Did the professor inform you?"

"Naturally. We spoke often. We had something of a meeting of the minds. Unlike your rapport with the doctor, rather, we are both of a mutual intelligence, and your doctor, for all his good and godly qualities, is rather dimwitted."

"Perhaps by some standards. Perhaps not by others."

"Perhaps."

For a long time, there was silence. All I could hear was the falls, roaring and shrieking and mourning in the background, mourning the death of a man who I had thought too evil to be mourned. Did I still think so, now that I stood before his only friend? Could I still think so? When I die, will people wonder why Watson mourns me? Will Watson mourn me? I suppose we shall all find out soon. In the fall's cacophony which drowned out all thought or speech, I found myself thinking of the old Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, the story of a man who is stolen by the fairies, and whose lover steals him back. _They had neither sun nor moon, but told time by the roaring of the sea…_

"I will help you."

"Thank you."

And I did, taking his shoulder on mine and helping him to rise, then leading him carefully to a boulder where he could sit down comfortably. "Judas Priest," he breathed, his face pinched in pain, "do you eat at all? Your shoulder is sharper than jack cheddar cheese. I knew you were scrawny, but I didn't know you were made of only pine needles and string."

"I shall take that as a backhanded compliment, I suppose. Can you set your leg, do you think?"

"I believe so. It looks to be a clean break. I'll only need some wood…and I have my belt, but the usage of yours would be appreciated. And necessary."

I slipped my belt off of my trousers and handed it to him, cursing the fact that I had not thought far ahead enough to at least bring a small valise to the falls. "Here you are, sir. I shall go search for wood."

I did as I said I would, starting out in the next moment. I almost expected Moran to call me back, but he did not do so. Instead I, surprising myself greatly, turned to look at him and asked him, "Why?"

"Why what, sir?"

"Why are you assisting me? By allowing me to offer you what assistance I can, that is."

Moran paused. His unshaven face worked with feeling.

"Sir," he began in a slow, deep, deliberate voice, "I have never been a man of conventional morals. Then again, nor have you. Like the late professor, I chose a different side of the law than that of the game you play. But there I have been happy, happier, I think, than you have been, doing what you say is right. And yet, I have had, I think, more humanity than you yourself, Mr. Sherlock Holmes." He gave a sharply excruciating intake of breath, and humanity suffused his disfigured face. "What is it that you do? You exist alone, in your little flat at Baker Street. Your only friend has left you for a lady. And besides, what was that friendship ever? Sodomy and inversion, only sodomy and inversion. I have had friends beyond that. The professor and I, despite our morals, which might be interpreted as slightly lax, remain uniquely human. Uniquely human."

Moran looked at me out of eyes filled with pain and knowledge. Again, for what seemed the thousandth time that day, I felt how young I was.

After a moment, I turned away.

1 A quote from Twelfth Night.


	5. Purple Ink

**Chapter Four**

**Purple Ink**

London. The thirteenth of July, 1891.

It was, of course, because of the purple ink that I ever discovered Mrs. Martha Hudson, and consequently the Baker Street residence into which Watson and I moved.

The moon had set that night, and it was plain that the hour was fairly late. The prospect of sleep, however, had unfortunately decided not to make its gracious self known to me. I was ostensibly walking but actually brooding, and was not entirely sure which street I was on, nor did I care. Getting lost has always held, if not an appealing quality, then a certain fascination, for me. When I was a small boy, I would lose my mother on purpose, then test my ability to find her once more. (I generally could, and the police were only called in to find me upon two occasions. They only found me upon the first. Henceforth I have been rather doubtful of the official force's abilities.)

I knew London so entirely well that it became more and more difficult to become properly lost. It was not so surprising to me, then, when I saw a rather singular thing, and realized with a demoralizing jolt where I was. Baker Street. The houses were all uniformly the same as other London residences, but Baker Street possessed one single very peculiar feature which I had noted only the other day, passing by in a hansom. In one Baker Street front window was a rather queer rooms-to-let notice. You yourself, whoever you are, would have found nothing remarkable about it, but when one spends time analyzing the different ink make-ups preferred by forgers, one tends to notice ink types. The ink on this sign, barely visible and flickering in the gaslight, was bright purple. The color was certainly eccentric, although undeniably eyecatching. _Rooms to let. Inquire within._

I paused midstride. Why bother? And yet. _Rooms to let. Inquire within. _After all, part of what had driven me to wander the streets at the witching hour was the thin walls of my Montague Street mousehole. (Indeed, so thin that I could hear my neighbor's every move.) _Rooms to let. Inquire within. _They certainly would not be within the range of the very limited purse of the world's only private consulting detective. But could it hurt to look in on its owner? If anything, it might give me some idea of the price range I could expect to find upon decent rooms in London. I had half reached for the bell before I remembered the hour. Laughing at my own singlemindedness, I opened my pocket watch. It informed me that the time was half past three, and definitely not the time to go calling on persons with rooms to let. I looked consideringly up at the house. Quite an ordinary place, looked to be quiet, comfortable, and suitably spacious. Exactly the thing for a bachelor who intended to marry only if threatened at knifepoint. Although I would have to have a flatmate, would I not? I could hardly field the prices myself…I wondered what they would think of my profession.

I am unlikely to forget the way in which I spent that morning, waiting for the sun to rise so that I could inquire within as the sign entreated me to do. Sitting there on the curb before 221 Baker Street, I thought of whom I should meet to go halves on me for the rooms, and what they might think of me. Oddly enough, my thoughts never strayed to what the house's true owner might be like. Fortunately for me, my lack of curiosity would soon be remedied. At precisely six o'clock that morning, I knocked on Martha Hudson's front door. It opened almost instantly, as though anticipating me, to reveal a solid, square shouldered, graying lady of mature years. She was still in her nightgown, extremely worried and apparently thinking me some sort of doctor.

"What is the news?" She demanded sharply. "Is he better? Worse? Did he receive the food we sent? And what of her? Has she stayed there all night? I haven't slept a wink. Why did they send you? What are you – ah." Seeing my raised eyebrows, she paused, and, embarrassed, broke out into one of the most surprisingly radiant smiles I have ever had the good fortune to see. "Ah. My mistake, sir. I thought you were bringing some news I have been expecting." She paused, one hand at her mouth. "Why are you calling? And why at such an early hour?"

"Madam, I am Mr. Sherlock Holmes." One day, I thought to myself, I will say that to people and watch the recognition in their face. "I wished to inquire about the rooms. The rooms to let?" I added, seeing her puzzled face.

"Oh, yes!" She laughed. "I _am _sorry. My mind is in quite another place." Awkwardly, considering the early hour and her mode of attire, she added, "Won't you come in?"

But Mrs. Martha Hudson is less a woman than a force of nature, and has never been anything less. She, in quick succession, offered me tea, informed me of the great virtue of the rooms she had to let, told me that there would be no excessive drinking and no lady visitors without herself to chaperone (I informed her that it would not be a problem) and then added, in the most friendly tone possible, that no, she absolutely could not lower her price. For the first time in my life, I felt entirely monopolized. With my family, however overbearing they may become, I have always had the younger brother's natural superciliousness. With my tedious university teachers and the even more tedious tutors of my early childhood, I had the healthy contempt of a bored student. But there is the manipulation employed by men, and then there is that employed by women, and the latter is, I admit, far more effective. I have had many people attempt to frighten me over the years, yet none of them are quite so alarming as an angry Mrs. Hudson. I believe this is because she is as sweet as honey until her dander rises, at which point I can only advise anyone in the immediate vicinity to take the quickest available route to an obscure part of the Continent.

"You are certain you will not bend insofar as regards price?" I asked for the last time, reaching for my hat. I believe I asked her more to test her mettle than because of any real hopes I had of a lower rent.

"Certain, sir," the lady answered, nodding firmly. "I hope you may find someone to go halves with you."

"I have hopes," I said, not a little dryly, and put my hand on the doorknob. "Good morning."

"Wait!" I turned around to see Mrs. Hudson with one hand stretched out in something of an entreaty. "Wait." She paused, and her face worked. She seemed in significant distress. "You have caught me, Mr. Holmes, unawares, as you can see. I am truly in need of someone to take the set of rooms. Perhaps the price might be mitigated…"

I sighed. I dislike being forced into the role of the benevolent man, partly because other people always seem so entirely surprised. "No. No, certainly not. I am sorry for my earlier request. Plainly your finances are in no condition as would allow that, considering the small income from your husband's death, and the obvious negligence of your son, after whose health you were so very worried. Please, do not make any special provision for me."

Her mouth fell open. Oh God, I thought gloomily. I have done it again, and without even trying. Now she will be horribly offended, no doubt.

I was incorrect, but what did happen was equally appalling to me. She pressed one hand to her small, perfect mouth, and began to quietly cry.

I will freely admit it: I never know what to do when this sort of thing happens.

"Ah. Mrs…that is…madam…I am sorry. I fear I have offended your sensibilities. I did not mean to upset you with my references to your family. It is a bad habit of mine, I am afraid, to know too much, and then to say so. A thousand apologies."

She gave one of those fragile, delicate smiles that one always sees on people who have been crying, and took a shuddering breath. "Oh, no. Not at all. It is only…well, you did surprise me, and I am quite…I am quite overwrought. And how -"

"How did I know?"

Mrs. Hudson nodded, her mouth a thin, resolved line. "Have you been…watching me in some manner?" She laughed at the inherent silliness of her question, then pursed her lips. "You are correct in everything but your comment upon my son."

"Well. Your husband has passed some time ago, as there is no gentleman's coat hanging from the hooks, and you are a Mrs. – plainly you are no spinster. As to your son – well, I am incorrect, you say, but I had assumed that your worry when I rang your bell stemmed from the illness of a close acquaintance. Having observed such violent feelings of affection in women for their children before, although not personally, I deduced it was your son."

She shook her head, mouth still tight so as not to cry. "No. Mr. Hudson was not fond of children. The gentleman whose health so concerns me is in a bed at St. Bart's presently, and I am sure he will be well. He is only the friend of a friend."

I left Baker Street considering the facts. I had just met an woman who had domineered me, no easy task, and most likely indicative of high tolerance for alarming experiences. If I pursued my current occupation, the little rooms at 221B Baker Street would suddenly find themselves acquainted with several alarming experiences, myself the least among them. Yes, it would certainly be an ideal place of residence. Also, I had to admit I felt mildly indebted to the poor lady. Someday, I told myself, I ought to learn to curb this tendency towards informing people of their entire biographies, disquieting or otherwise, upon meeting them. (It has been ten years since then. I have not learned, and it would take a disquieting incident with Watson before I would even make any real effort.)

The facts were very simple. Baker Street was an excellent idea. And now, the only thing standing between me and the ability to sleep at night without being interrupted by the squabbling of my Montague Street neighbors was my distinct lack of a flatemate. Specifically, a flatemate who would not mind constant impromptu violin concerts, often at unusual hours, distinctly unpleasant chemical experiments, and extreme sulkiness. This was going to be a highly interesting man, whoever he was. I set off for St. Bart's, trusting as best I could in providence.


	6. Of Corpses and Soldiers

**Chapter Five**

**Of Corpses and Soldiers**

London. Saturday, the sixteenth of July, 1881.

The dissecting room at Saint Bart's was uncomfortably hot, and the heat was definitely not improving upon the vague odor exuding from the corpse on the dissection table.

"It's really quite impossible," I remarked harriedly, examining the dark smear of bruise on the corpse's mandible. "The rates of lodgings in London nowadays are fully intolerable. Maddening. I do not blame the lady to whom the rooms belong, it is simply a case of raising prices, not any particular mercenary qualities in her…still, my income simply cannot support…" I trailed off, taking the corpse's chin in my hand and gingerly opened its mouth, examining the eerie blueish pallor of the tongue. "Did his hanging go entirely smoothly? Do we know?"

The other man, waiting for his glanced up from the book he was reading. What was his name? Stratford? Stoneford? Aside from his obvious love of red wine and his occupation as a dresser I knew nothing about him. "I don't know," he blustered awkwardly. "If…I didn't bring him in, Mr. Holmes. I think it was Overby. You could call him, I suppose. He can't have gone far."

I shook my head. "No, never mind. It was only idle pondering." I couldn't blame the man for being flustered – I had been discontentedly delivering a monologue at him for near to a quarter of an hour. My earlier outburst had been regarding the prices of lodgings in London. I had rooms in Montague street, but they were so miniscule that it was mainly due to my prodigious thinness that I could move about in them at all.

Going back to my perusal of the dead body, I swept its uncut hair back from the unseeing eyes, and stared fixedly at them. He seemed to have been in decent health, perhaps the hanging...

"By the way," the dresser suddenly put in, effectively pulling me out of my idle contemplations upon the corpse's possible ethnic lineage, among other things, "not to poke my nose into your business, Mr. Holmes, but why did you request a look at him?" He gestured at the corpse. "We only got him here because he was hanged – for theft, I think – on Friday, and the medical students were going to take a look at his squashy bits." The dresser grinned a little.

"It is pure curiosity," I answered him. "I have been working, you see, on a rather particular experiment…I am looking for a re-agent precipitated solely by hemoglobin. The particular blood I have been using for testing is -"

He looked at me in consternation. "Not your own, surely!"

I shrugged. "Yes, my own. I see no reason why not to do so."

"But haven't you been working on this for some time, you said? You must have undergone a fair amount of bloodletting!" The dresser (Stanford? Soleford?) gave an uneasy laugh.

"Well, yes. But it is mainly only pinpricks." I held out one hand, showing him the bits of plaster that covered my hands. I was rather amused and not a little gratified to note that his eyes seemed to grow several sizes at this sight. "It seems…well, the difficulty was, did it make a difference if the blood was dead? If so, how long? You see the logistical setback."

The dresser (Staleford? Stimford?) nodded vaguely. He rather obviously didn't see the dilemma, but I let it pass. "Yes, it's a difficult one," he remarked, in an earnest attempt at communication.

I groaned. "Not so difficult as the problem of whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price. I'm afraid the puzzle of re-agents precipitated by hemoglobin alone is the least of my problems."

He chuckled sympathetically, and we both returned to our work. My inability to place the dresser's name was beginning to significantly bother me. I had certainly been absorbed in my researches of late, but regardless, this was beginning to reach a ridiculous point. Forgetting names was a travesty not to be endured. Could it be possible that Sherlock Holmes was becoming too absorbed in his work? (Could it be possible that the previous sentence is not an utter contradiction in terms?) Company in the form of a flatemate would certainly solve the problem well, not to mention alleviate my current difficulties in finding some rooms tolerable to me. Then again, it would be distinctly difficult to find a flatemate tolerable to me, or indeed a flatemate to whom I would be tolerable. I possess, as I have known for years, both a keen sense of self awareness and a brutally honest older brother. As a consequence, I am well aware that I am sulky, eccentric, egotistical, and highly volatile. I believe my habit of admitting this freely forgives me some of it, but regardless, a man would have to be hard pressed for company or living space to share rooms with myself.

I was right, of course. The poor broken soldier of a creature that Stamford – Stamford! That was his name! - introduced me to a few weeks later was indeed hard pressed both for company and living space. At the time that we first met, however, I was quite taken up with another train of thought entirely, as my hemoglobin work had finally come to a satisfactory conclusion. Consequently, the first memory I have of him is a sad one.

The two of them must have entered some time before I saw them there. When I did, I jumped up, full of energy and excitement, and thrust the test tube into Stamford's line of vision. "I've found it!" I cried out, and came close to knocking Stamford's companion over in my invigoration. He stumbled for a moment, blown over by my happy forcefulness, and I could see him with his guard down. It was a sad sight indeed.

He was all the more tragic for his relative personableness, possessing a handsome face and what might once have been a strong, muscular build, but war and all its byproducts had taken its toll, and he was now nearly as thin as I. (No easy feat, that.) He limped significantly on his right leg, carrying a walking stick for reasons wholly unrelated to what was fashionable, and held the same shoulder rigid constantly so as not to jostle it. Once, he had plainly been a perfect example of the best of the great age of Queen Victoria Regina, moustache and waistcoat and all, but now he was like a tragic parody thereof.

Stamford, bless him, did not miss a beat. "Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes."

He held out his hand to shake, and I was surprised by the relative firmness of his grip.

"How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

These were the first words I ever spoke to John Hamish Watson. And what a pleasure, then, to see the way his face went slack with astonishment! I was to see that same look many times in life, but I will always recall that first look of wonder and shock, as though he were a child watching a conjuring trick, with special fondness.

"How on earth did you know that?"

I almost regret, now, that our first exchange was so very ordinary. I have practiced the same basic exercise in simple deduction upon almost every client for whom I have worked in my entire career, not to mention as something of a subversive parlor trick when I am forced into social situations. To have said the same to him, as though he were any other man I met on the street, seems unfitting. Then, of course, I did not know what he was to be to me. But now that I am unlikely to see him again, I cannot help but idly wish that every moment I knew him, from the instant we met to that last sight of him, calling out to me over the roar of Reichenbach, had been spent indulging in the rapport so singular to us.

Suffice to say that we found each other's temperament congenial, even pleasant. And if perhaps he found my secretive habits and moody behavior unsettling, and if perhaps I worried after his nocturnal pacing and Afghanistan induced depression, well, then neither of us ever mentioned it.

Neither of us. Ever.


	7. The Little Boys Lost

**Chapter Six**

**The Little Boys Lost**

London. March seventeenth of 1883.

It was quiet there at night, far preferable to the constant sounds of squabbling neighbors. The landlady slept downstairs, peacefully and deeply, and I kept quietly in my bedroom just off of the parlor. Already it felt like mine, more like home than Montague Street or the family estate at Sussex had ever been. At first my nights were full of a perfect peace, actual reasonable amounts of sleep for once, until I heard his footfalls in the room above. His room was just over my own, and in the night, I heard his pacing. The limp in his left leg gave it an alarming rhythm, as though he might tumble over at any moment. I found myself jerking to catch him before I realized that I was not near enough.

Why did he pace? Looking back, remembering the thoughts I had on the subject, I once again can see how young and stupid I was. Why did he pace? Why could John Watson not retreat to his bed, to sleep, to the nonjudgmental arms of Morpheus? War is a dreadful game, long, drawn out, savage and impossible to win. The man was ravaged, truly ravaged, first by war, then sickness, then by coming home to a city where no one knew him or cared to grow to know him. I should have seen the signs, of course. It was, if I may put it in these terms, my worst failed case. He could not have been more deeply lonely.

There is a certain isolation to London that I have always noticed. The weather is as cold as the people, and to be in London and friendless is to feel as though one is freezing in the mythical hell of Dante. By gaslight, life is painfully clear, and so it is by gaslight that ostracized men die and live in our great capital. Those who have companionship, who possess that sacred human right to communion, are those who survive in London. It was, I realize only now, truly a blessing that we found each other when we did, as much as for myself as for him. I realized upon my move to Baker Street that I suddenly felt a good deal better. I, shockingly enough, ate three meals a day under the watchful eyes of Watson and Mrs. Hudson. If he had known how surprised I was at the difference it made to me, I am certain he would have mocked me in his gentle way, but I kept my secrets close to me.

I remember the way he had of mocking me, tipping his head to one side with a smile lingering like a kiss at the corner of his mouth. His laugh was soft, generally, and unobtrusive, as though afraid to offend, but sometimes I could catch him off guard enough that I could coax a louder laugh from him, a really resounding one that almost shook the ceilings…

But I was speaking of his pacing.

Every night, it never failed. Back and forth and forth and back until it seemed he grew too exhausted to pace further, and collapsed insensibly into bed. Because I could not sleep while the noise of his footfalls intruded upon my rest, I took to reading poetry at nights. Perhaps a part of me was bothered by that bald judgment, "Knowledge of Literature: Nil." I read Shakespeare's plays once more, and the constant thudding of Watson's limping footfalls became one with the iambic feet. The qual (stomp) ity (stomp) of mer (stomp) cy is (stomp) not strained. (Stomp.) A gloom (stomp) ing peace (stomp) this morn (stomp) ing with (stomp) it brings. (Stomp.) Is that (stomp) a dagg (stomp) er that (stomp) I see (stomp) before (stomp) me? Soon, it became such a part of the poetry that I almost did not notice at first when the pacing stopped. One night, I simply went to my room, and he went to his, and there was silence from the upper room.

In the absence of other stimulants, certain chemicals will dissolve and fuse into each other. Chemistry has taught me far more than how to most efficiently burn a hole into Mrs. Hudson's best taffeta curtains.

That sound had been some form of communion so long as it had gone on, and its sudden absence made the poetry feel peculiarly incomplete. Beside this, I had begun to have a completely irrational worry as to why the pacing had suddenly stopped. Could all not be right with John Hamish Watson? I thought of what I should do were that the case, and was surprised to find that my mind stopped itself in the way it does when I ponder what I should do if I were to meet with a near fatal accident. Once, my universe of human beings was so small as to include only my brother and myself. Finding Watson was like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday's footprints in the sand, not in that he was as intelligent as myself, for he was not, but in that he recognized the common humanity we shared, and my universe stretched to include him.

The carpet of the steps softened the sounds of my bare feet as I hurried up to Watson's room, a candle in one hand. I cannot help but prefer candle flame to gas when I am alone in my own home, perhaps because it was the only illumination available to me when I, as a child, would read late into the night. Just as I was doing then, in fact. Amusing, how my life seems to run in cycles of irony. I knocked as softly as possible at the door, only to be greeted with a rather justifiably confused, "Who is it? Mrs. Hudson? Holmes?"

"It's only me," I answered, my light tenor feeling slightly juvenile next to his deep, resonant baritone.

"Come in, come in." Was that surprise in his voice? Surprise at my concern?

I pushed the door open with my shoulder, careful not to spill any of the candle's hot tallow. Watson was settled comfortably into the ratty old armchair that had once belonged to Mrs. Hudson's husband, who had plainly had a distinct affection for foreign made cigars, if the ash stains were any judge. "Good evening, Watson."

"Hardly evening, Holmes. It is getting on past eleven. Is there something you need assistance in? Has there been a grisly murder somewhere in -" Watson yawned so widely I could see his jaw crack, "- somewhere in Whitechapel? Excuse me. It is only that it's rather late, not any grievance you cause me."

"I know, doctor, and I apologize for the hour, really, but I did not hear your footsteps from downstairs, and I worried that something was amiss."

An unexpected flush came into his cheeks, and I felt an answering one in mine. "You have heard my pacing?"

"Well, yes, obviously." I shrugged. "I was not attempting to, but my bedroom _is _directly below your own, after all, Watson…"

"I am so terribly sorry." The good doctor slumped in his chair, his dressing gown and nightshirt falling into folds that almost seemed poetic. Then again, everything seems poetic at eleven o'clock at night after having read too much Blake.

"No, no! Not at all. I was only worried after you." I must have looked quite a picture, in my mouse colored rag of a dressing gown, holding a tiny candle stub as though it were a diamond from the mines of King Solomon. "Is anything wrong?"

"Why, no." The embarrassed look still had not left him, and I was beginning to be ashamed for his sake. "Nothing at all. The pacing, you see…"

"Yes?"

He paused, lips still open, eyes reluctant. I know that face. I have seen it all too many times on an informant who does not wish to be called a stool pigeon by his fellows. In the good doctor's case, however, it was only himself that he could "snitch" on, so to speak. And I admit it – I was rather intrigued at the prospect of my ever upright, although physically and mentally broken friend's past having been less than spotless morally. Perhaps it was some guilt that deprived him of his sleep.

"You know, Watson, I keep the secrets of half the criminal classes and most of Scotland Yard, to say nothing of my own secrets, and the secrets of the crowned heads of Europe, the upper classes of Britain and all manner of et cetera and what have you. Pray, do not imagine I will tell your own."

Watson managed a lopsided smile. "Thank you for the reassurance, my dear fellow. Go on, take a seat. There's only the bed, I'm afraid, but it's better than nothing."

"Yes," I agreed, settling myself comfortably down where he had suggested. "Thank you. Now. In any case. You were about to tell me why you had been pacing."

To my surprise, he began to laugh. "Holmes, you are really the absolute limit."

"What do you mean?"

"You're sitting there interrogating me as though I was one of your clients, sitting there in the armchair with the light striking me from the window." He was smiling merrily now, his bad mood almost seeming to have been lifted. "I'm not, you know. Not everybody in the world is a problem to be dissected. I'm only a person, and a fairly ordinary one at that."

I looked quizzically at him. If this was a joke, I did not see the humor in it. He shook his head, a tiny rueful smile on his face. "I do not mind telling you. You know that I trust you implicitly. It is only that, sometimes, at night, I am possessed by a fear – and it is very childish, mind you, silly and irrational – that my leg," here he gestured at the place where the Jezail bullet had done its damage, "will cease to function entirely. That one morning, I shall rise as always, and my body simply will refuse to obey."

"And has it ever happened?"

A brief frown passed over his well cut face, but then he saw the lightness of my remark and smiled once more. "No, no, of course not. It is only a silly fancy."

"Nothing so potent as the psychological effect of a war wound should be put off as merely a silly fancy. Perhaps you ought to remember that, doctor. I should not wish you to wake one day immobile from the waist down."

Watson chuckled once more. "Nor should I, Holmes. Nor should I."

We sat in companionable silence for a moment, before I realized what the purpose of my visit had been. "Watson," I began, curiously, "why is it that you've stopped this pacing? Has the fear left you?"

"Not entirely." He shrugged slowly, a slightly foolish smile touching his mouth. "I suppose it never will leave me entirely. Regardless, though. Since I came to live here…It is almost gone. Before, I would sit up all night with it."

"Almost gone. That _is_ good."

"It is indeed."

We said our good nights rather abruptly, at the time, without knowing why, but I paused at the door, suddenly reluctant to go. This is foolish, extremely foolish, but I felt as though his room was somehow warmer than the air outside. It was not a particularly cold night for that particular time of year – March – and yet somehow inside that room it seemed easier to breathe, as thought the air had the consistency of warm honeyed wine. There was no reason for it – the furnace heated both our rooms to some degree, and yet I found myself reluctant to leave his behind.

He gave me a quizzical glance, behind which might have been some brand of fear. "You know," he said, "you look as though you've lost your way. Your room is just downstairs, you know," he smiled good humouredly.

Dutifully, I laughed, then remarked, "It's odd you should say I appear lost…I was only just reading a Blake poem to that effect. 'A Little Boy Lost,' it is called."

"Knowledge of Literature: Nil," he quoted gleefully at me, smiling. He had a wonderful, honest smile. It suffused his eyes and whole face, truer and more believable than any smile I had ever seen. "I am glad you see you work to rectify that."

Laughing at him, I waved one hand. "Don't be foolish, Watson. I'm not reading Blake for any but myself. And possibly for Blake, I suppose."

"Precisely. You are taking my advice towards your own self betterment."

I snorted disdainfully. "Hardly."

There was hardly more to say, and I was just regretfully turning my back to him to exit into the cold corridor, when he stopped me. "Holmes! Stay."

I turned sharply at this peculiarly solicitous choice of words, but all out of the common thoughts were gone when I looked again upon his utterly ordinary, utterly moral countenance. The very epitome of the stark, loyal highlander. "Yes, Watson?"

"How does the poem run?"

"Are you trying to give me an examination? You're hardly my tutor, you know."

"Recite, please, Master Sherlock," Watson replied, half in jest, but I knew he wanted to hear the poem nevertheless.

A Little Boy Lost is a simple poem, and a simple story, of a simple boy who tries to use simple reason to rationalize an equally simple religious system. None of it had particularly affected me but for the last stanza, and it was this that I quoted to my dear friend.

"And standing on the altar high,

'Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:

'One who sets reason up for judge

Of our most holy mystery.'"

The stanza had nearly made me weep when I first read it, moving my lips along with the words as is my habit when reading poetry. I lived in constant fear that someone would enter my room as I read and see me speaking the lines of Byron or Southey (What a juxtaposition that is. Mr. Noel would not be pleased.)1 to myself, and think me mad, perhaps. But I (the cynical detective who maintains that he possesses no poetry in his soul reluctantly admitted) loved the effect the sounds have upon my lips. It is pleasantly physical in a way so few things are in art.

" The weeping child could not be heard,

The weeping parents wept in vain:

They stripped him to his little shirt,

And bound him in an iron chain."

I could see Watson's face working in distress. He looked almost alarmed, more than was warranted by a simple poem. I ceased my recitation to move quickly towards him, as his hand jerked to his shoulder wound. He looked well and truly alarmed. "Watson, are you quite all right? My dear fellow, you look positively frightened. Are you quite well?"

"Naturally, Holmes, naturally." Watson frowned, preoccupied, as I touched his shoulder. "I was only thinking of …never mind. Only a gentleman of my acquaintance. The poem recalls him, rather. Carry on, please do. Don't be so worried, Holmes. It's very –" He paused again, surprise incongruously on his face. "It is beautiful."

I cleared my throat and began once more. The last stanza had been my favorite since I first read the poem, particularly its last line, haunting and disquieting, as though the moral core of the entire lyric.

"And burned him in a holy place

Where many had been burned before;

The weeping parents wept in vain.

Are such thing done on Albion's shore?"

"The weeping parents wept," Watson whispered after me. Standing over him as he sat in the chair, I stared down at the top of his head and thought of parents, weeping or otherwise, and found myself wondering for the first time what his might have been like. I began to wonder rather more about my flatemate and friend that night. Had he ever been in love? Could he, it occurred to me rather alarmingly, be in love with some lady now? I only hoped she might be worthy of him…I found myself gazing, for no reason whatsoever, at the strip of pale white skin just below his collar line that had gone untouched by the merciless sun of Afghanistan.

"The weeping parents wept," he said again. "Upon repeating it it seems foolish, redundant, even, but the first time it only seems as though their misery is so great Blake must reiterate it twice."

"'Reiterate it twice?' Speaking of redundancy, my dear Watson…"

"All right, you have me there." He swatted at my arm in innocent jest, but for no reason at all, I found myself jumping away, and I did not know why. I left soon afterward, miserable to do so, but more miserable not to. I was so entirely puzzled by my own actions, my own odd motivations, so as to be almost afraid of myself.

_Are such things done on Albion's shore?_

Not so long as Labby's law2 still stands.

The only things I can think of as I write this are not love, not hate, not desire or morality play, but a million million regrets. There are far too many "if onlys" in this tale. If I had known then what I know now.

I still have my notes on Greek tragedy (from the Ancient Greek tragedieia, meaning, in the totally inexplicable way of the Greeks, "goat song") from when I was a schoolboy. They are smudged and near illegible to me now. My scrawl back then was reckoned one of the neatest ones for a boy of my age. I recognize it now for what it was, which is, of course, illegible. It hardly can seem to have ever belonged to me.

I am not what I was as a child, or as a young man. I am not what I was yesterday. Tomorrow I have no doubt I will be someone else.

A tragedy must entail the downfall of an ordinary man. Not of a good man, for that would be unjust, nor yet of a bad man, for that would be, as Aristotle says, revolting, but a man with one single flaw. Hubris, or excessive pride. I have had this in abundance.

Finally, the hero experiences anagnorisis, an epiphany of his place in the world, when he suddenly comprehends that everything he has done up to this point has been wrong, and that there is no way to go back and undo what he has done, no matter how terrible the damage or the havoc wreaked. Oedipus cannot very well simply annul his marriage to Iocaste. Creon cannot resurrect his dead son and his son's equally dead fiancé. (Not to mention first cousin. Incestuous creatures, the Greeks.) Orestes cannot undo what he has done, nor can he deny fate. None of us can. And so at our anagnorisis, we rip our eyes out, or we die, or we keep on living. I could have died at Reichenbach. I kept on living.

One of our most elderly lecturers at the college on Greek literature used to say that perhaps the most tragic of the Greek heroes are those left alive, to contemplate what they have done.

Of course, the same old elderly lecturer would also say that if a hero thinks himself a hero, he is still too full of hubris to have achieved anagnorisis in any case. Or perhaps they are too flawed, and not even a hero at all.

_Are such things done on Albion's shore?_

Yes. Oh, yes.

1 A reference to Southey and Byron's infamous feud. Or, rather, Byron's feud with Southey, as it seems to have been mostly on Byron's part.

2 A reference to Labouchere's Law, a piece of legislation prohibiting sodomy.


	8. Mercutio Falling

**Chapter Seven**

**Mercutio Falling**

London. March thirtieth of 1883.

"Mercutio. Name derived from mercurial, or changeable. Represents a part of the material, cynical universe as opposed to the emotional universe occupied by the lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Has large amounts of dialogue that is absolutely hysterically funny if you happen to be an Elizabethan, but that is fairly silly and extraneous if you are a English gentleman in the fine age of Victoria Regina," I said, rolling up the sleeve of my dressing gown to scratch at my arm.

"You knew what I was thinking," Watson pointed out obviously. "Which is, incidentally, precisely what you always said bothered you so much about Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin."1

"You are quite right, Watson. Mind reading is an intolerable habit. It is unacceptable." I paused. "Except, of course, from me."

"In whose case everything from theft to murder to mind reading is acceptable."

"Precisely," I retorted, smiling with a cheerfulness I did not feel. We had both just returned from the theatre, Romeo and Juliet, in fact, as per my earlier remarks, as performed by the Royal Shakespeare company. "But, my dear fellow, in relation to your earlier confusion regarding the good Mercutio's significance…well, men have suggested many things regarding Mercutio. I myself once pondered writing something on the subject. I played him, you know. To some acclaim."

Watson looked up, surprised at this new revelation of my past. "Really?" I couldn't help but smile. Watson was always fascinated by each new piece of knowledge regarding the life I had led before we met. I could not blame him, either. Were I not I, I should certainly be extremely interested in me. "You _were_ on the stage, then."

"In manner of speaking, yes."

"I thought so." Now he was smiling broadly too.

"Why so captured by Mercutio's meaning? He is only a minor character, after al," I remarked, turning the rudder of the conversation away from the unnecessarily dangerous waters of my past life.

"Actually," Watson chuckled, "it was my own powers of observation that led me to him. Every time the actor personifying him entered the stage, you became noticeably more interested in the goings on of the play."

"Well," I replied dryly, "you might simply have attributed that to the very plain fact that, to a man, not one of the characters in Romeo and Juliet is half so interesting as Mercutio. He represents what Dr. Freud in Vienna is calling the id. The part of man's mind, if you well, which only desires. Craving without limit or rationale is the hallmark of the id. Mercutio personifies the childish mind, despite his years. His immaturity is all the worse, for he chooses it, as opposed to actually being a child. His humor is morbid and confrontational at best, sexual or scatological at worse. I could go on about him, but I'd only bore you."

"No, please. I should like to know why it is that he captures you so."

"Well, in part it is absurdly simple. He reminds me of university, partly because that was there that I played him, and partly because Mercutio has a very British university sort of outlook on life. Women do not enter into Mercutio's world, unless they do so as objects of indecent pleasure or as objects to be mocked, such as Juliet's old nurse. He's an Oxford boy, really, for all that he's a young man in 1600s Vienna. What does it matter, in any case? Do you fancy a game of chess?"

"No, not presently. You've already defeated me in terms of analysis of dramatic literature. I don't particularly wish to be repeatedly checkmated in the same half hour."

"You might win, you know."

"Elephants might sprout the wings of seraphim and take to the skies."

"If we are to believe the outré theories of Mr. Charles Darwin, one day indeed, perhaps elephants may indeed become airborne."

"If we are to believe the outré theories of Mr. Charles Darwin, then you are closer to a chimpanzee than you would be altogether comfortable admitting, Holmes." For one very disquieting moment, Watson's expression reminded me of Victor Trevor's2 mischievous glinting grin of old.

"Touche," I yawned, and shut my eyes. The defeated foil brandisher retreating to his corner of the practice room. "You know," I remarked drowsily, the words tripping casually out of my mouth without bothering to notify me that they planned to do so, "People theorize quite a bit about Mercutio. I myself have always –" I yawned again "-have always considered his disdain of love rather fascinating. When one ponders the fact that Romeo seems to be the fickle personification of romance between the male and the more deadly female of the species, and that his loyalties change quite a lot throughout the play, while Mercutio's never do, it all suddenly becomes very interesting. Because of his aversion to Romeo's love affairs, some have suggested that he is a representation of that rather disreputable practice of the British schoolboys and sundry other youth. Residents of Sodom, as you know." I stretched and opened my eyes.

I was rather surprised to find that Watson was looking at me with all the fixed concentration of an artist on his model, or of a cat on a particularly promising mouse. His eyes, brown and wide and alarming, were fixed inextricably upon one of my hands, the one I had lifted towards the ceiling in order to stretch. I blinked, then self consciously folded my hands in my lap. After a moment, a moment which managed to stretch itself long over the time generally allotted to one instant in time, he too realized he was staring and looked away. "The disreputable practices of our youth?" He said, blinking.

_Our youth_, he said. _Not the British youth. Our youth. _Did it mean something? Did it mean nothing at all? Perhaps it meant only that he recognized me as likewise a part of Her Majesty's kingdom. Or perhaps it was only that I was alone, or seemed it, or had always seemed so, and so he used the first person plural inclusive to make my loneliness a little less.

Not to imply, of course, that I was at all lonely. I had been lonely too long to have any explicit awareness of it. It was instead a simple implied reality. But having him present in my miniscule universe had only accentuated the space between myself and the rest of the known world in general, and he in particular. Something like the usage of narcotics, it likened itself to the way one is after one has used a drug. A tolerance is built up. One requires stronger and stronger doses. Eventually, one begins to experience a strong physical need for the drug, manifesting itself in symptoms such as twitching or incessant scratching, not to mention depression, irritability, or a decreased libido. This physical need seems to persist despite the degree of damage that the drug may cause a man.

_The disreputable practices of our youth._

University. I remembered university. Hiding quietly, foolishly satisfied with my isolation, in the corners of libraries and study halls, studying my peculiarly eclectic studies. Linguistics. Mathematics. Some work in dramatics, such as that utterly second rate production of Romeo and Juliet that now stands out so infamously in my mind, simply because I spoke of it to him. But really, back then, I was as alone as I was at Montague Street. Until, of course, Trevor.

1 Holmes does, too, and very sarcastically as well, in A Study in Scarlet.

2 A reference to Holmes's sole close friend at university. Trevor was at the center of Holmes's first mystery, and the one which inspired him to pursue his career as a private consulting detective, The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, which Holmes eventually did recount to Watson.


	9. The Gentleman and His Dog

**Chapter Eight**

**The Gentleman and his Dog**

Oxford. November twenty-second, 1874.

I remember his dog, intolerable little terrier that it was. (In the defense of particularly vile specimen of _canis domesticus_, I eventually became very fond of it, and perhaps my later liking for dogs such as Toby can be attributed to Trevor's terrier and the positive effect it had in my life, the dogs of the Baskerville's and the Rucastle's notwithstanding.)1 Trevor's particular little dog was a savage thing, and it was the dog that quite literally dragged me into meeting the young Mr. Victor Trevor. It is possible that the dog, filled with hubris as any tragic hero, felt it knew what was best for me, and more importantly, for Trevor, its master.

"Good morning," someone said briskly, sharply jostling past me in the January air.

"On their way to chapel as well, I'll be bound, to further serve the Lord," I muttered ironically to no one at all. (Perhaps the dog heard me and liked my sense of humor.) It was freezing, and even comically wrapped as I was in two overcoats, I could feel frost collecting on the collar of my waistcoat. I did not turn to answer the man who had greeted me so gruffly, but instead bent my head against the wind, got a firmer grip on my books, and walked on. I had lost my boots two weeks ago, and my shoes were nearly worn through, so that icy melted snow trickled inside and wet my feet. Feeling extremely sorry for my rash, young, cut-off-from-the-family-finances self, I stared down at my copy of Machiavelli's The Prince,2 and tried diligently to pretend that the rest of the world had passed out of existence.

It was probably by staring so at my books that I missed the sight of the dog. The next thing I knew, there was a soft but insistent tug at the ankle of my trousers, and then it became more violent. I tried to tug my ankle away from whatever it was that held me fast, but whatever it was only growled and bit deep into my ankle with its sharp teeth. My resulting cry of pain must have caused quite a stir among the general populace of the university quad, but I do not remember that. Instead, I remember the ruddy face of Victor Trevor, bending fretfully over me as I lay there, and that infernal canine licking with a warm tongue at my freezing cheeks.

During university, I had only one absolutely miniscule room in a house which I shared with ten or twelve other young men, who I do not believe remembered my name for more than twenty seconds together. (To be entirely fair, I certainly did not then nor cannot now remember theirs.) The female gender was a mystery to me as much as to the average university male – I was unique among my peers purely for having no interest in an Eve to play tempter to my Adam. I was far more interested in perhaps an Abel to occupy my Cain.

I must impress upon you that I was no Lord Henry Wotton, nor even a Dorian Gray.3 I was instead a sort of nervously antisocial Dr. Jekyll, as driven and obsessed as the literary figure. The entire subject of physical or carnal stimulation simply did not seem to concern me. Until Trevor, of course.

I had known I might possess a propensity for sexual inversion from the moment I realized my true parentage, and the idea had disquieted me in the extreme. It was therefore with relief that I found in my adolescence that although women were frankly unappealing to me, I found men, if I found them at all, equally unappealing. And what is more, everything that could not be found in its full entirety between the pages of a book failed to interest me.

It was the naïveté of him, I think. Being only a university boy, it made me feel superior, and so I remember that feeling of being jaded and old at such a young age with perfect clarity. From the moment when I saw him standing over me, myself collapsed in the snow, pulled down by his dog, I knew I would not be able to help liking him. Who would? Isolated as we were by our various peculiarities, he was still more functional than I had ever been. I still have the letter I wrote to Mycroft regarding my acquaintanceship with Victor Trevor. It is rather humiliating to read again, being full as it is of youthful silliness and such naïveté as would be more likely attributed to Trevor than to myself.

My dear Mycroft, (the letter began)

The weather continues dreadful. Other than that, very little news, except for that I have, in defiance of all the bets I am sure you placed, actually made a very good friend, one of the other university boys, Mr. Victor Trevor. Trevor is a very pleasant man, quiet, although mildly perceptive, and I like him very much. We met through a series of peculiar circumstances, namely those involving his tenacious bull terrier and a copy of Machiavell's The Prince, and have since become mutual tutors. I am dismal in Biology, he is far more dismal in French, and we therefore assist each other.

You are unlikely to meet Trevor. I, at least, shall make a concerted effort to the contrary. If you do, however, I should inform you of something. I know that, considering our different parentage, you are quite convinced of my propensity towards certain indecent practices. You will therefore be convinced that my friendship with Trevor is of a psychological4 nature, and I assure you, it is not. Certainly, Mycroft, he is quite Greek in appearance, and his attitudes and tastes are likewise Greek5, but do not worry. The sins of the father have not passed themselves down into the blood of the son. I will be quite all right. After all, we will know I am not doomed to a life of amorality if I come out of an acquaintanceship with Victor Trevor unscathed. Do not worry, I have done nothing imprudent, nor do I plan to, and you may believe me when I say that. It may be that in some undiscovered part of my nature still, I take after my father, but I believe placing it this nature in close proximity with something like to it and yet still not allowing it any stimulation may yet starve it until it dies.

A nature is a nature, of course, brother Mycroft, but I do not intend to consent to this thing that may perhaps be a part of mine.

I remain, most respectfully, your terribly humble brother,

Sherlock

That letter was never sent. The idea that I even wrote it to send to Mycroft (Mycroft, of all people!) was terminally absurd in the first place. Now I can only see it as young Sherlock's desperate attempt to convince himself of his own normalcy, a quality I have never actually possessed, no matter how I have tried to.

I met Trevor properly the day after I had been laid at the heels by that self same obnoxious terror of a terrier. I was collapsed unhappily into an armchair, smoking copious amounts of cigarettes and reading Goethe in all his pithy glory. Ordinarily, an excuse to live out of an armchair with no one around but Goethe would have pleased me greatly, but before what Trevor and I later began to jokingly refer to as the Frozen Terrier Incident, I had been anticipating several crucial fencing tourneys, and lying languidly about when I could be battering another man with an epee seriously bothered me. For these reasons, I was in no very excellent mood when the young Mr. Victor Trevor first came to call.

He was pale but vigorous, and very nearly knocked the door off of its hinges as he energetically threw it open. Then, frantically, he tried to get it back in place. Amused, I watched him from my chair, feeling elegantly superior. "Hello," I greeted him eventually, my voice studiously dry. He spun around, his every movement a manic apology.

"Hello," he replied, his voice still seeming to possess some of its adolescent awkward cracking, despite being only two years younger than myself. "I'm – I don't know if you recall, you were in a pretty state – not to say of course, that I thought – I simply –"

"Of course I remember you. When a dog freezes onto one's ankle, one is not in a hurry to forget either the dog or its poor owner. You are Victor Trevor, the gentleman with the unique misfortune to own the animal that dug its teeth into me this past Sunday. You have few friends at university, although you possess something of a social circle elsewhere. You fancy yourself something of a poet, and you have, or would like to have, high standards of morality."

He very nearly dropped the copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass which he had been holding. I was suitably gratified by the expression of awe in his face, and duly (to quote my dear brother Mycroft) removed that smug grin from my already unattractive enough features.

"Why, Mr. Holmes! Have we met? However did you know all that about me? Are you so angry that you've been having me followed by –" his face assumed an expression of such extreme terror that I could not help but pity the poor man, "_solicitors?_"

Later, I discovered the origins of Trevor's extreme fear of being followed. They were not pleasant.

"Certainly not, Mr. Trevor. You need not worry. I am simply a perceptive person." Later in life, I would begin to pause dramatically before revealing my thought processes, but now, I merely trotted them out one by one to be examined at the other's leisure. "You are holding – or were, rather, it's lying on the carpet now - a copy of Leaves of Grass, by Mr. Walt Whitman. Standard accoutrement for the self titled poet. Also, you are obviously moralistic, considering you have come to see how I fare despite the fact that you are plainly absolutely terrified of what you imagine to be my wrath. That you possess a social circle elsewhere is evident from the fact that you are plainly dressed in the aesthetic6 mode, which is not something a man adopts for his personal amusement. And lastly, your lack of friends here at Oxford is declared by that same bizarre philosophy."

"Oh!" Trevor laughed, and I experienced the dubious joy of yet another person informing me of my own simplicity. "For a moment I thought – but no. I suppose I am fairly transparent at that."

I shrugged, rapidly losing what little interest in him I may have had previously.

"Still, though," he added, capturing my fancy once more, "It is remarkable that you recognize me for the transparent thing I am. After all, to others everything is opaque. I never heard of anyone doing that outside a detective novel. Please, pray forgive my dismissal of it."

"No, pray forgive _me,"_ I replied, "for troubling you." In later years I was to grow out of the habit of apologizing, but as of this time Trevor's simple words of flattery were enough. Besides, I was begin to foster a certain fondness for this awkward creature. He behaved the way I would have, were I not so covered my countless layers of restraint.

"Oh, it is quite all right," he replied, shutting the now repaired door and moving as though to sit down. Then, however, he paused for a moment, asking an unspoken question of me.

"No, no," I answered him, "Please do come in and take a seat. I am bored with Goethe," I explained, waving the poor German gentleman before his face, "And all his pithy glory."

"Well," Trevor replied, settling into the chair opposite my own, "Pithy Goethe aside, I really should ask you what I came to ask."

"Please do."

"Well…are you all right?" He looked at me, in all my armchair ridden invalidity, and blinked. "Well, perhaps that would seem to be the wrong question. _Will _you be all right, and if so, when?"

"I'm….or rather, I will be, quite fine. For the moment, however, I am afraid I am rather laid up."

"That really is too bad." For a long moment Trevor sat there, chewing his lips, which were a chapped shade of pink. Then, a new idea seemed to occur to him. "Look," the man provided, "I'd like to be able to call often after you. Look in on you, like. I feel responsible, you see."

"Don't." I let the word hang wetly in the air before countering it with a pity remark almost worthy of Goethe. "It is really your dog who ought to be experiencing serious symptoms of guilt and regret."

"His name is Algy, and I can't imagine he will, to be entirely frank and earnest with you."

I cocked an eyebrow. "Algy? After the ocean organism?"

He smiled "After Swinburne."

"Aha. So is his full name Algernon Charles?"

"However did you guess?"

When a friendship begins with a frank discussion as to why or why not one should name one's dog after Algernon Charles Swinburne, one can be certain it will endure. It did, too, for about a year, which was forever to a young man in university, after which my Swinburne phase came to a slow but decided stop. (Swinburne was, I must say, a hypocrite.)

And so it was, I suppose, Trevor's idea for me to meet his friends, and I did so despite my initial protests. As I had deduced, he had not many within the walls of Oxford University, but in town there were a circle of young men, all of whom had been removed from Oxford on some peculiar pretense, and now lacked either the finances or the energy to move from their place. They collected in dark corners and seedy hotels, and so it was really quite odd that I became, if not friendly, than at least cordial with them. For the most part, I believe they liked me for the sake of having a prudish, silent creature off of which they could bounce their absurd philosophies and beliefs.

They were all aesthetes, or professed themselves to be, and I remember each one of them with near perfect clarity. There was Trevor, of course, who was not really the leader but certainly the heart of the group, and a young man whose name was Bertram Theophilus, but whom they all called Theo and who vainly refused to wear spectacles, a extremely utterly utter man named Jonathan Cyprian, and Georges Deriane, a painter who had once been aggressively religious and was now cheerfully godless.

There were what I suppose might be called the rudimentary beginnings of an affair with a girl, mostly, ironically enough, at Trevor's urging. I can recall the conversation in which he brought it up. We were all sitting about a small café which Trevor's friends monopolized every week so that they might have their suitably artistic utterly utter aesthetic discourse.

"You know," remarked Georges Deriane, twirling contemplatively one strand of his far too long dark hair, "I am quite convinced that there must be unplumbed depths of romance in you, Holmes."

The others all snorted with unabashed amusement. "Holmes?" Bertram Theophilus chortled, toying with his glass of white wine. "Unplumbed depths of romance? About as likely, my dear Georges, as one of Catullus's ladies having unplumbed depths of adoration for gentlemen."

"Sapphic, quite Sapphic, Bert," Cyprian smiled, "and tasteful, too. Charming."

"Stop trying to sound like Oscar Wilde," Deriane retorted, swatting playfully at him with a copy of the London Times.

"He doesn't _try_ to. It comes naturally." Theophilus sipped at the wine. "I think there's water in this. And it's quite nasty, in any case. Why do we come here?"

"Because Deriane has been banned from every other eating place in Oxford," Victor Trevor provided cheerfully, taking a bite of his plowman's sandwich. "Oh, hello, gentleman. Regard the new arrival."

I turned at his word, as did the others, to glance at the café's doorway, where a young lady stood. She had apparently just come in, and was, encouragingly enough for a fellow such as Trevor, without chaperone, respectable looking or otherwise.

"Very pretty," said Deriane dismissively, obviously not interested, picking up his glass of water once more and taking a long drink.

"More than pretty," Trevor amended. "Beautiful."

"Now who sounds like Oscar Wilde?" Cyprian demanded sarcastically. "I do believe it's you, Victor, my friend."

"You sound like a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe, actually," I observed, amused. "Or maybe a poem. By Swinburne, of course. Or Shelley."

"Byron," offered Theophilus. "The two of them do go together, after all. George and Percy." He had a ridiculous fondness for Byron. I, on the other hand, found the man's poetry highly adolescent, not to mention the quality of his morals, which were simply not to be believed.

"Yes, until Shelley bloody well got himself drowned," Theophilus said gloomily.

"Don't curse," Cyprian remonstrated him. "It's hardly aesthetic."

"_I'm _hardly aesthetic." Theophilus retorted irritably.

"Oh, yes you are. You're just in a brown study today."

"I am _not_."

"You're being contradictory," Deriane pointed out. "It's always that that shows it in you."

"Would you all like to talk a bit more, and more loudly about literature? Perhaps if we name enough poets loudly enough, she'll think we're intellectuals." Trevor was sitting up very straight, in a fit of decency.

"Aren't we, though?" Cyprian wondered.

"Sherlock is. We're just dandies, you and I, Cyprian," corrected Deriane.

"And what else should we be?" Cyprian waved one hand elegantly. "Beauty is enough."

"If beauty were really enough," I remarked astutely, "you would be content to stare at her across the room, as opposed to making pretensions in order to impress the dear young lady. And haven't I told you not to use my Christian name?"

"You have," the godless artist answered me. "I didn't listen."

"That much, I think, is plain."

"God, really?"

"Will you all please shut up?" Trevor was now shifting frantically in his seat. "Or at the very least, talk literature."

"Lit-rah-tyure," Cyprian mocked sweetly.

"Precisely," Trevor snapped.

"Right then! Lit-rah-tyure, gentlemen." Deriane reached over and snatched Trevor's sandwich.

"Here, Georges, give that –"

Deriane bit into the tragically enormous amalgamation of bread and meat with relish. "No," he said thickly, then made a truly disquieting face. "Ugh. On second thought, for pity's sake, Trevor, take it back."

Trevor held the sandwich as though it were a dead mouse. "I don't want it _now._"

"Lit-rah-tyure indeed," I said, watching in all amusement.

"Why doesn't Sherlock –"

"_Holmes."_

"Why doesn't Sherlock go talk to her?"

"Because I don't _like _women."

Cyprian laughed loudly, then conspiratorially leaned over and whispered, "Well, neither do a majority of us!"

"I am well aware that I am sitting at a table of degenerates," I snapped, throwing a pleading glance at Trevor. He, however, was concentrated on the lady.

"This remark, I resent," said Theophilus softly. No one paid him the slightest amount of attention at all. They never seemed to, where the quiet, blonde solicitor of their group was concerned. The poor man was a creature of the bar, not really an artist at all, although he desperately wanted to be one, and I always felt vaguely sorry for the way his friends casually ignored his opinions. The two of us were alone in being awkward in any sort of romantic entanglement. Cyprian, of course, was an indulger in what he tended to term, "gentlemanly games," and what the courts tended to term, "the most detestable vice of buggery," and Deriane simply did whatever appealed to him at the moment. Only Theophilus and I possessed anything even remotely resembling traditional morals of the age of Victoria Regina.

"Hardly a majority, Cyprian. And besides, you took my meaning."

"Yes, I'm afraid I did. Well, go over. Talk to her."

"Indeed," Deriane coaxed. "We'd be denying the female population."

"You're already denying the female population," Theophilus remarked.

"Hardly. We are at least sharing out remarkable gifts with," Deriane lowered his pleasant tenor voice to a likewise conspiratorially hushed whisper, "the _male_ population." The cheerfully hedonistic gentleman tilted back his wine glass and drank the last dregs of it, sighing. His Adam's apple bobbed. He really had physically not grown out of adolesence, despite being twenty three years of age at the very least. Deriane's whole appearance was very much calculated to make him seem as young as Hebe of the Greeks. I am sure he would be very gratified to hear me say that his success was complete. There were times at which I might even have mistaken him for seventeen or eighteen years of age.

"Weren't we supposed to be talking about literature, not Holmes's romantic conquests?" Trevor was becoming more and more annoyed. Plainly, he found the young lady quite lovely.

"Or lack thereof," Cyprian put in helpfully. "It's lit-rah-tyure, in any case," he added, gesturing gracefully with his glass of cognac, "and we duly shall."

"Do your stentorian bass voice, Jon," entreated Theophilus. "That will certainly get the lady's attention, although it certainly will not make poor dear Victor's odds any more advantageous."

"If anything, less," I said earnestly.

"Oh believe me, I shall do my stentorian bass voice, Theo," Cyprian declared with relish. "I positively _shall_."

"I am tempted to hide under the table," Theophilus joked.

"Hush, Theo," laughed Deriane, "it was your benighted idea, my dear."

Before Theophilus could even blush at the insinuating look in Deriane's face, Cyprian was spouting the names of famous – or occasionally, rather infamous – aesthetes in his best low baritone tones.

"Dante Gabriel Rossetti!

"Oh God. For –"

"Percy Bysshe Shelley!"

"You know, far too many of these men have three names," remarked Georges Deriane contemplatively. "I wonder why that is?"

I believe that Cyprian was about to propose a theory when we were interrupted.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen."

As one, we raised our eyes, and were all shocked to discover that the presence hovering over our table was none other than the young lady who had been the subject of so much conversation, to say nothing of controversy. She was indeed very pretty, with short cropped hair topped by a small blue hat. Her dress was yellow, however, creating the impression that she was some sort of peculiar breed of wildflower. Her accent was American. In later years, when I had studied speech more, I would be able to attribute it to central New Jersey. "I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but I could not help overhearing –"

"You could not help _what?"_ Plainly, Cyprian was in a mood, for he pounded his cognac glass onto the top of the table as though infuriated. The bottom duly broke off, and as one, we pretended not to notice.

She, however, gave a loud, tinkling, high laugh. In the sudden silence, as all the café began to turn our way and stare, it seemed very prophetic, to say nothing of icy and beautiful. "Why, gentlemen, you are all very vehement today. I was merely about to say that I do beg your pardon, gentlemen, but I couldn't help overhearing – not eavesdropping, merely overhearing – that your Mr. Sherlock Holmes is in need of female companionship." Her smile was hardly insinuating, but Deriane met it with the most insinuating smile I had ever seen or hope ever to see.

"Yes, we were," the man provided, "We were indeed. He is certainly in need of female companionship, ma'am, if you take our meaning in a way precise or whatever it is they say nowadays –"

She gave a short gasp of offense, somehow managing to cut off the speech of Georges Deriane, which is generally concurred to be entirely impossible. "Sir, I do not take your meaning in a way precise or whatever it is that they are saying nowadays. Much to the contrary, sir, I was merely desiring to take your young friend away from your no doubt uninspiring company."

"Oh, indeed," Theophilus provided, suddenly loud and assertive, probably now that one of the women whom Deriane so often scorned had turned the tables and scorned _him_ in return. "Indeed, uninspiring, and I speak as a member of that uninspiring company. Go on, Holmes. It can't hurt, and no doubt she's better society than we are."

"Unless, of course," Cyprian said provocatively, cloudy eyes twinkling with indecency, "you would prefer to go find a Piccadilly renter."7

That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I rose in an outburst of indignant anger, pushing my chair back with a disconcerting clatter. I could feel my ears turning red with embarrassment and anger, a habit of my adolescence that had never entirely left me. Those of the café's customers who had not been watching us before certainly were now that the scrawny man-boy whom the aesthetic scoundrels had been mocking was finally showing a bit of backbone.

"Yes, Miss," I said, struggling to keep my voice steady, "I believe I shall take my leave of this entirely inappropriate company. I think, really, that their society is having an entirely adverse effect upon me."

She nodded, pleased, and I could not help but notice how very pretty she indeed was. Trevor, for all his nerves and foolishness around women, had an excellent point. "Come with me."

1 Holmes refers to the murderous or nasty dogs in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes shot several dogs, including one other in The Adventure of the Creeping Man. Peculiar, for a professed dog lover to have to shoot them so often.

2 Holmes seems to have had some very interesting ideas about what it is appropriate to read in chapel.

3 Holmes refers to Oscar Wilde's highly homoerotic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

4 A nineteenth century code word for homosexual.

5 Again, a nineteenth century code word for homosexual.

6 A nineteenth century cultural movement, much like punk or hippie in modern culture, of which Oscar Wilde was one of the ringleaders.

7 Victorian slang for a gigolo, or male prostitute. Primarily of London, but Cyprian uses it here in an impression to seem cosmopolitan.


	10. The Intuitive Lady

**Chapter Nine**

**The Intuitive Lady**

I hardly paid attention to the whoops and catcalls from Cyprian and Deriane back at the table I had previously occupied, but I did register an amount of surprise when the young lady led me out of the café. In its small garden, there was a small wicker set of garden furniture. She pushed me down into one of the chairs, and sat gracefully down in the one opposite from mine. "Now," said the pretty young lady, frowning, "you had better tell me what exactly you are doing with them."

"Why, they are my friends. Of a sort. Trevor is, in any case. Victor Trevor, that's the gentleman who was wanting to speak with you originally. I simply go about with them upon occasion. It is not my inclination, but Mr. Trevor thinks I ought to go out of my rooms at the university more."

"Plainly," she said dryly, pursing her lips, "Mr. Victor Trevor is right. You certainly do need to go out of your rooms at the university more."

I stared at the air just to the right of her left shoulder, and felt humiliated. "Yes, I suppose it might be a good idea."

Seeming mollified, she nodded once more, her blue hat bobbing on her head. "I'm glad you see the rhyme and reason of my suggestion. Very glad indeed. I suppose you know the natures of the men you're hobnobbing with?"

"Oh, yes. I always know what other people don't know. It is a habit of mine."1

"But sir, you may be sure that everyone in that café knows their nature."

"They are hardly reticent about it."

"Upon the contrary," she corrected me, "they pretend very well to be reticent, and yet the reality is quite different. They are the most affected group of men I have ever come across."

"They are. But Mr. Georges Deriane is a rather decent artist for all that. The rest of them are poets, or rather, they think they are. Mr. Jonathan Cyprian writes plays as well. He wants desperately to be Mr. Oscar Wilde, and I believe he may be coming close."

"Indeed."

"May I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance?" _Well, bear witness to me,_ I thought ironically, _Young Mr. Sherlock Holmes having the pleasure of making the acquaintance of lovely young ladies. I suppose she is an attractive female, for all that. I shall have to ask Trevor whether she is or not when I return._

"You may or may not have that pleasure, sir. It all depends, to be perfectly frank with you, on whether or not what you say to me next pleases me."

"Does it really?" I could feel an irritating worm of doubt beginning to germinate persistently in the back of my mind.

"Yes." She paused, crossing her legs daintily at the ankle under that voluminous yellow gown, and then began contemplatively, "You intrigue me. You are plainly unlike them, and yet you are very friendly with them. Do you really _like_ them, in any traditional sense of the word? Or do they simply possess a quality or two with which you empathize?"

She had caught me off of my guard. I looked up sharply, surprise in my every feature. "Do you make a habit of asking people things like this?"

She shrugged, daintily again. She seemed to do everything with a delicate, dainty strength that was even more disquieting than if she had been overtly belligerent. "Only if they interest me, sir."

"And I interest you?"

"You are an interesting person."

"Thank you. I am not however, sure if I entirely appreciate that fact."

"The fact that you are interesting?" She cupped her face in her hands as though to mock me with her childish attitude, almost as though I were her school teacher.

"Whether or not I am interesting is a mute point, Miss. I am only slightly alarmed by the fact that _you_ find me so interesting."

"What? Do you not like answering questions?"

"I do not like answering them truthfully. In terms of lies, I can grant some leeway."

"In terms of leeway, I can grant no lies."

I blinked. Plainly, this peculiar creature was clever as well as pleasing to the eye. Clever insofar as wordplay determines intelligence, in any case.

"You have not answered my question, sir. Are you really fond of those creatures whom you call your friends?"

"Not…really, no," I answered, with a certainty I did not feel. "Except for Mr. Trevor, of course. I am really very fond of Trevor. And I do not mind Mr. Theophilus either. Theophilus – they call him Theo – is the gentleman who told me to go with you."

"Oh yes," she smiled brightly. "I like Mr. Theophilus. As for the opinion of the rest of them – You lie," she finished decisively, and knocked back what little remained of the liquid in her water glass.

"Perhaps I do. What does it matter to you, ma'am, if you don't mind my forwardness in asking?"

"My curiosity begs to be satisfied."

"My dignity begs to be let alone."

It was, I think, this woman – this girl, really – who taught me that silences are just as persuasive – if not far more so – than empty conversation. For two full minutes she did not speak one word. A waiter came, dressed in the pin stripped uniform that marked the employees of the café, and offered her more water. She declined, and asked politely for a glass of lemonade. I listened to the raw, open American As in her speech, and I did not take a single piece of refreshment. For another four minutes neither of us spoke. The silence muffled my normally sharp tongue, and I was beginning to realize that I still did not know the lady's name. It seemed too late to ask it, though, and I sat there with the awkwardness like cotton in my mouth.

The lemonade arrived, and she sipped it with polite gusto. I still did not speak, doing my absolute best to remain silent. Unfortunately, the stale air began to strangle me, and I fell, desperately reeling, into one of the wide, bottomless gaps in the conversation.

"Look Miss – or madam, rather – if you have a question, then ask it. I haven't the time for these peculiar rambling silences."

"Are you a fairy too?" She asked, her voice alarmingly quiet. Her eyes were soft, but even so I could not help but give an involuntary shudder.

I was not a fairy. I was not anything at all.

"That question," I hissed, infuriated and incensed, "is entirely unwarranted, to say nothing of unladylike."

"Ladylike is not my province, sir," she answered lightly, "and nor is conventionality."

"Apparently so," I snapped bitterly. "If you are mad, be gone. If you have reason, be brief."2

"You are, aren't you?"

"You have no manners."

"None at all," she agreed, earnestly placing her elbow on her knee and leaning towards me. "Do not worry. I am not trying to extort some sort of confession. Heavens no. I'm no fool. I've read the poems of Walt Whitman.3 He's one of ours, you know," she added proudly, no doubt in reference to her American heritage. "Or one of yours," she added slyly.

"Yes, I am quite aware," I said dryly, shifting in my seat, more uncomfortable around women than I had ever been before.

"You really do only lie about with them – pardon me, no indecency intended – because they are what you wish you could be, is that right, sir?"

Instinctively, I blazed up at her again, but then, just as much by reflex, my eyes dropped and I was laid bare for a moment in all my natural young man's honesty. Defeated, I dropped my head into my hand, which was propped, birdlike, onto one of the wicker arms of my chair.

"I thought so!" She cried, victorious. "I was positively sure. I really did think so. I'm so glad you've confirmed it, really, I am. I _do_ appreciate it. Don't be so sulky about it, sir."

"Good_bye_, Miss. Good afternoon. I am done with you." For the second time that afternoon, I rose in a fury, the hot sun on the back of my neck feeding my anger. "Quite done!"

"Oh no!" She caught my sleeve, looking genuinely remorseful for the first time in all of her apologies. "No, no, no. Naturally not. Sit down again." I looked disdainfully at her, and she pouted prettily. "Please?"

With a heavy sigh, I sat back down, and the frown dropped off of her face like ten pounds of mud, to reveal the well remembered radiantly insinuating grin. "Excellent! So, sir, we can talk properly now. I realize that you only stay with them because they are what you wish they could be. They are artists. Aesthetes. Or rather, they at least think they are. And you wish you could be an artist?"

"Perhaps."

"Or perhaps not." She paused, sipping her lemonade, and chewed one dainty white finger. "I rather think you wish you could, and that it's only the fact that you don't know what your art is quite yet that is stopping you."

"Well, you must admit I'm not quite suited to poetry or to painting, even knowing what little you do of me. I am not naturally inclined to any of the things people call art, much less the artist's mad lifestyle. I am hardly George Gordon Noel Byron, after all."

"I don't know. Do you keep a bear?"4

"My temper is nearly bad enough to be called one," I admitted.

"Is it really? Then I am lucky to have escaped it this long, am I not?"

"Oh, you have not escaped entirely. And with good reason, might I add."

For the first time, the lady seemed a little chastened. Her blue hat drooped a little as she slumped her slight shoulders. Hurt, she nursed her lemonade. I thought perhaps she had realized the utter impropriety of her behavior, and I was about to make some sort of cutting remark when the waiter came by once more, offering me a glass of wine, courtesy of my friends within. Grumbling grudgingly, I took it, now feeling abashed in turn for having so unabashedly abashed the young lady, and sipped moodily at it, glancing through the window at Cyprian, Trevor, Theophilus, Deriane, and Co.. They seemed to entirely forgotten me after sending me the refreshment, and were absorbed so completely into one of Theophilus and Trevor's periodic chess games that I no doubt could have screamed the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the top of my lungs and they would have taken no notice. The aesthetes of Oxford, as I sometimes called them in jest, only played chess when I was not present, as if I was present, I would inevitably ask to play, and then beat them all soundly, harming further their already fragile self esteem.

"I am sorry," said the girl, jerking me out of my contemplations. "I've no doubt offended your sensibilities very deeply, and I don't blame you for being offended, although that certainly was not my intention. I'm very deeply sorry. Pray, go back to your friends. And make a concerted effort, please, to make believe that you can forget our brief meeting today."

"I really am not sure I have any particular desire to."

She looked surprised. "Really? I have not offended you too much, then?"

"Of course you have. Don't be silly, I was trying to make you feel better. I think I shall be going now."

"Don't leave just yet, please. I like you."

"If you like me, I should hate to see how you behave towards people you dislike."

"Touché," the girl joked miserably. "You have scored a point."

"Not really. If so, you have certainly scored your share of points, Miss. I have seen your passado.5 And now I really must be going."

"All right." She sniffed into her lemonade. "All right. Oh, this is so dreadful. I am always trying to be friendly, but everyone else seems to have such a _very _different idea of what is proper than I do."

"Yes," I replied dryly, feeling sympathetic against my will. "That much is quite evident."

"Oh. Oh dear." What might have been a tear fell into the lemonade. "Oh _dear."_ She said again. "I do not think I will ever be of any use here in England."

"Why are you here in England, if you do not mind my forwardness in asking? You seem to be from America. New Jersey, to be precise."

Her head came up, eyes full of surprise. "How on God's green earth did you figure that out?"

For once, I had no desire to make some long explanation that would make me sound infinitely superior to anyone this girl had ever even met. "It doesn't matter."

"You're right, I suppose it doesn't, really." She laughed. "I suppose you were going to tell me that you're a detective, like Auguste Dupin from Mr. Edgar Allan Poe's stories."

"Not in the _least_ like Auguste Dupin from Mr. Edgar Allan Poe's short stories."6

"I've offended you again, now."

"Not really," I said, and was surprised to discover that it was quite true. "Goodbye, now, ma'am."

"Wait! Don't you want to hear the answer to your question?"

To be frank, I had entirely forgotten about having even asked the question, being absorbed in my on amusement at her comparison of myself to Mr. Edgar Allan Poe's August Dupin. "I…certainly. Yes."

"I am here, in England, en route to Poland, from America."

"Poland, of all places?"

"Yes. I will be singing there."

"You are a singer?" _Yes, Holmes, of course she's a singer,_ an obnoxiously superior part of my brain hissed angrily at me, _the way she lifts the soft palette on her vowels? Who does that but a singer? And a singer of grand opera, at that._

"Yes, I am a singer, or I should like to be. I am no longer with my parents – but that is quite the long story, and I'm sure you have no desire to hear of my woes." She laughed again, that odd tinkling sound, like bells at Christmas, or water trickling into a basin. "I am here with a benefactor."

"A benefactor?" Not totally without intelligence, I craned my neck about to see who was nearby. "Aha. Would your benefactor, Miss, be by any chance the elderly gentleman who is looking at me as though he'd like to have me strung up on the rack, drawn, and quartered?"

"And then eat your innards."

"With copious amounts of hollandaise sauce. Yes, precisely him. With the golden watch chain."

"Yes, that is my benefactor. Mr. Arthur Wagner Rogers the Third." Her uncomfortable expression spoke volumes.

"Well!" I could hardly help it. I laughed now. Perhaps she wanted to be a singer, or once had wanted to, but any young lady of such remarkable loveliness who was traveling with a man so very expansively large, and yet somehow handsome could not help but be something entirely other, and far less proper, than an opera singer. "Excellent luck, I'm sure, ma'am, with your career in 'singing.'"

She glanced sharply up, then snapped furiously at me, with a controlled, cold anger, "Sir, I am unlike you. I do not take insults personally – or at the very least, I make a concerted effort not to – and I will take your vulgar remark regarding my profession in my stride. However, I must correct you. In the most polite parlance, what you believe me to be is referred to as a lady of the night. I am far, far, far, from a lady of the night, I assure you, sir. Au contraire, I am a woman of the midafternoon. Goodbye sir." She had turned resolutely back to her lemonade when I tapped her politely on the shoulder.

"I do beg your pardon, Miss, but might I inquire – what is your name?"

"What could it possibly be to you?" She demanded, all business.

"Why, how else will I follow your fruitful opera career?"

She gave a genuine smile then, and turned her face back to mine. "Well, I suppose I can. But tell me the truth. Is the real reason you wish to know my name so that you can report back to your friends that you have made the acquaintance of an attractive young lady, and as such may be attracted to her in a romantic manner? And thus possess a propensity towards women?"

Surprising myself, I allowed her jibe to pass, perhaps because it had hit home so very well. "Believe what you like about my motives, Miss."

"I certainly shall. Know only that I am well aware of your propensities, even if they are not. Oh, and I nearly forgot. I am called Miss, or ma'am, if he who addresses me feels more politely inclined."

"We are not characters in a farce. Your real name, please, Miss."

"Irene Adler."7

"Sherlock Holmes."

We shook hands. And although I did follow her opera career, which was indeed fruitful, and then her later career as something of a courtesan, I did not see anything of Irene Adler in person for a long, long time.

Years later, when Mr. Doyle finally published his work upon the subject of the case I handled for the King of Bohemia, many people began to be of the opinion that Mrs. Norton, nee Adler, had once had an affair with me. I may they never realize how utterly wrong they were, and that in fact Miss Adler was the first person ever to force a frightened boy to face himself, so long long ago, in a Bohemian Oxford café.

1 This seems to be an adolescent version of the famous Holmes utterance: "My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

2 Holmes quotes Lady Olivia to Viola, disguised as the Page, Cesario, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

3 Whitman's poetry was unashamedly homoerotic.

4 Byron famously kept a bear as a pet during his years at college, in response to the school's rule prohibiting dogs.

5 A fencing move.

6 This seems to point to this scene having taken place after The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, as Holmes thinks of himself as a detective, which he did not previously.

7 There is a certain irony in Irene Adler, oft referenced as "the woman," or the only woman Holmes was ever attracted to, even appearing in this narrative, much less having been the first person to accurately deduce his true sexual orientation.


	11. Wise Enough to Play the Fool

**Chapter Ten**

**Wise Enough to Play the Fool**

London. March thirty-first of 1883.

"And how wise in that?" Watson asked, his voice hoarse from sleep.

I glanced up, hardly surprised. "Watson, Watson. You really must learn to modulate your breathing. I can hear you coming from a mile away. What _do_ they teach them in the British army these days?" He, still in dressing gown and pajamas, was up unusually early. So, of course, was I, but only because I had forgone sleep the previous night.

"These days. Hark. You're a mere child."

"So are you. Two years of difference in age is not so much."

"It is enough when it marks the difference between arrogance and experience."

I looked sardonically at him over the top of _Twelfth Night, _which I had been reading before he had entered. He began to laugh first, but I followed with a vengeance. "Have you rang for breakfast yet?" He asked, once we had composed ourselves. "No, never mind, of course you haven't…that would actually entail eating something. Possibly something that might allow you to stop looking like a specimen from the British Museum's collection of skeletons."

"The British Museums collection of skeletons? Hardly. I am much too thin for all that."

"You're in a mood this morning."

"I'm afraid that I am experiencing a rather difficult problem at the moment."

"Oh, really?" He perked up a bit, flicking the London Times open with a casual turn of his wrist that made my breath catch in my throat.

(Please God let me live through these next few hours or days without dying of the humiliation of it all. Of course, God, if he does indeed exist, is probably not terribly inclined to help me, all things taken into consideration. But did it ever harm one's cause to make an effort?)

"Yes, indeed. A very difficult problem in fact. Quite lurid, the stuff of banned fiction and Greek poetry, but nevertheless…" I found myself still staring at his wrists, his arms, the way he held his shoulders, and quickly looked away. "Fascinating," I finished.

"Is it something I might write up? I am without occupation. I'm afraid I may become a creature of ennui like yourself." He leaned against the wall, paging disinterestedly through the Times. "So. Would it hold interest with the readers of the Strand magazine?"

"Interest? Oh, yes, certainly. It would hold even more interest with the policemen of the Scotland Yard station. I'm afraid as of now I ought not to talk about it. But what was it you said when you came in?"

"What? Oh." He gestured at my book. "I was only joking. Twelfth Night, the play you're reading –"

"Yes, Twelfth Night. . .what about Twelfth Night?"

"How wise is wise enough to play the fool?"1

"Well, it does crave a kind of wit," I half laughed, setting the play down. "Come on, let us ring for breakfast."

"Saints deliver me. You're going to eat something?"

"It is within the realm of possibility. Faint possibility, and yet, we must have hope."

"Indeed."

"Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George."

"I certainly shall cry all those things, and copiously, and loudly, but only as soon as we get some breakfast. Mrs. Hudson!"

Mrs. Hudson came, breakfast was duly consumed, the Times was duly dissected, with much mocking of the general attitude of the Times, of Scotland Yard, and indeed of most of London towards the criminal classes.

"You know, Holmes, thinking this way can't possibly be healthy for you," he remarked eventually, glancing up from his plate.

"Speak for yourself, my dear fellow. _I_ was thinking about Shakespeare."

"Well, considering the depressing qualities of Shakespeare, I can't say that that is particularly healthy for you either. Admit it," Watson said firmly, stabbing the air with his fork, "you've been off your food lately, and off of your work, and off of everything else. What on earth is occupying you?"

"It must be the depressing qualities of Shakespeare," I answered dryly, unenthusiastically chewing on a piece of toast. "Especially as I was reading Twelfth Night, one of the most benightedly depressing works ever written."

"Surely you're joking."

"Naturally not. It's plain what happens after the end of the play."

"And may I ask what?"

"The rest of their lives are miserable, stuck in loveless marriages – look, did it not ever occur to you that they are all just a bit too eager to marry people who are marked in their resemblance to the same gender?"

"Say that again, I'm not at all sure I caught that."

"I was referring, Watson, to the propensity Orsino seems to possess for falling madly in love with his pageboys, unics though they may be."

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. I confess it – I really do enjoy making him highly uncomfortable, God help me. "Holmes, I really don't think you've been getting enough sleep of late."

"I don't either, to be entirely honest. I have been living with Urania, I am afraid."2

"Urania?"

"Greek muse of astronomy and the stars and such – I think I shall go to bed now."

"Holmes, it is eight o'clock in the morning. You've just had breakfast."

I flipped Twelfth Night callously onto the table. "I am aware." There was a bitterness to my voice that I had not known was ever there in my dealings with him. With him, I had never allowed that ugliness, be it the ugliness of my more improper desires or the ugliness of my fits of ennui, to show through. Oh, certainly, I had made life difficult for the poor man on more than one occasion, but then, that was my appointed role as eccentric flatemate. It would do no one good for me to shirk it. I paused, collecting myself. "As I said, I realize I have just eaten breakfast, and I fail utterly to appreciate your assertion of the fact. Now, good night, or good morning, or whatever it happens to be."

Stalking back to my bedroom, I could hear his worried voice at the back of my head. "Holmes? Holmes! Come back? Are you quite – you're not – Holmes!"

I wheeled round, fully intending to make some impolite and sarcastic remark, but when I saw his puzzled face, so full of concern and innocent affection, I found my ability to do so utterly destroyed. "No, don't worry. Really, do your best not to. I know the way you are about it, but you will simply have to act against your own propensities." _Well, Holmes_, I thought dryly to myself, _you might as well follow your own advice. Act against your own propensities indeed. _"I promise not to be abrasive if you will as well. I am going to go and consider my options. And why, with a bit of luck, I may actually surrender myself into the arms of Morpheus." _And Morpheus's arms are the only arms you will be surrendering into_, some sardonically insensitive, to say nothing of indecent part of my mind remarked.

And I kept to my promise, too. I would say not another word to him about my unique problem. Oh, no, the problem certainly belonged to no one but myself alone. It was my odd little puzzle. Only now, now that I am long dead insofar as it matters to him, now that I can never again speak with him regarding my unique and odd little puzzle, now do I realize quite how important it was to speak with him regarding it. After all, he was the problem, or at the very least, he was the origin of the present way that the problem chose to manifest itself. To speak with him would have been the sensible thing to do.

I had left a pamphlet, a work by Mr. Karl Heinrich Ulrich, on the settee.3

It would do my talking for me.

1 Watson refers to a line of Viola's in Twelfth Night. "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool."

2 Holmes makes an obscure reference to the term Uranian, or Uranian love, a euphemism used in the Victorian age for homosexuality. He then covers his tracks by making it into a reference to Urania, Greek muse of astronomy and astrology, which of course makes no sense whatsoever and only serves to further puzzle his friend.

3 Ulrich, a German author, was well known for his advocating of equal rights for homosexual men, or, as he called them, "Urnings."


	12. A Second Explanation

**A Second Explanation**

_**by Maxwell Gabriel Neiman the Second**_

At this point, the rather disconnected chronology of Holmes's account disintegrates entirely. He breaks off and, rather patchworkily, begins to recount bits of his journeys through Persia and Tibet.

In order to properly comprehend the series of events that took place in that fateful March of 1883, it is necessary to now turn our attention to the Hiatus Era personal writings of Dr. John H. Watson himself. These documents are invaluable to the true Watsonian scholar, for although Holmes is the famous enigma, Watson can only be said to be more so. Here we see some of Watson's demeanor as not a writer of accounts that would further the honor of his friend, but as a man compelled to recount events close to his heart. In these works, the doctor puts pen to paper in desperation so as not to forget a man who he at once venerated and, perhaps secretly, in the darkest corners of his mind, reviled.

Here I begin by print Watson's initial entry to what cannot be properly called either a diary or a memoir, but simply a retrospective, as it was neither intended for publication nor written while events took place. I have omitted his view on events already described by Holmes, as Holmes's viewpoint is the more pertinent to the tale up to that point.


	13. Language and Memory

**From the Hiatus Era Writings of Dr. John H. Watson**

**Chapter Eleven**

**Language and Memory**

London. The twenty-third of August, 1891.

I was not born to write. Certainly I do write, and I am told that I do so well. Certainly the financial takings from what poor brother Henry called, "that habit of scribbling away," have been quite pleasing to me. Certainly writing pleases me. The act of placing words onto a page, clear and honest, has always gratified me. However, this new task which I have taken upon myself makes me doubt that there is even the smallest chance of writing having been my destined profession. If ever I doubted before that I was meant to be a doctor, my doubts are gone. I am not a writer, that much is certain.

Words have become my enemies since Reichenbach. All too often, I am asked, "Please, what was Mr. Holmes like?" All I can do is stare open mouthed at the questioner, utterly unable to comprehend how they could ask such a simple, broad question and seek to fully understand an infinitely complex man. Of late, however, I have decided that fault lies not with the questioner, but with the language in which they question. The English of the British, while in my opinion more refined and sensible than that of the Americans possesses limitations that are not to be endured.

There are, _examplia gratia_, no words to fully characterize my illustrious friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. They simply do not exist in the language we speak. Perhaps in another tongue, more true to the human heart than our own, there is a word that means someone who is both friend and closer than friend, both, to borrow terminology from the rising Mr. Sigmund Freud, id and superego. Both – but I am forgetting. No one shall see these pages. No one shall see what I write here. Who have I to hide the truth from, save myself?

Lover is a difficult word. In secret, I am free to apply it where I please. At once I want desperately to do so, and just as desperately to forget the word, forget its existence, forget I ever heard it or the word it is derived from.

He is quite dead.

I have tried to think beyond that point, to think of how he said it was the ideal termination of his career, to think of how much sweeter the air of London is for the lack of Professor James Moriarty, but I have tried without success. My mind runs along its trains of thought, then collides headlong with another of those troublesome things called words. _Gone._ After hitting that word, my mind can only turn thoughts over and over, like a morbid nursery rhyme.

_He is gone. Holmes is gone. The best and wisest man I have ever known is gone._

I avoid Baker Street, giving it as wide a berth as I can. Without the potential of the sound of revolver fire issuing from the upper floor of number 221, the only place I have ever truly counted as my home has become as alien to me as Afghanistan ever was.

There cannot very well be a funeral without a body. It is as if he never was, as if when Professor Moriarty and he tumbled fatally from the falls, that great wall of white water eliminated from the earth the ephemeral conundrum of Sherlock Holmes. One thing has begun to nag at the edge of my mind, hardly the deep thoughts of grief and tragedy I should have at the loss of such a friend, but instead, what I can only describe as a doubt.

My memories were clear once, and in an instant I could recall the grace his hands had, the feel of his hair, the particular cadences of his eyes that told me everything, but the more I call the memories back, the more reluctantly they come. Soon, I know I shall forget. But I must not forget. I must never forget

What do men remember? Great events in history, great men. Men remember public things, things other men have seen and can attest to. And this is why I fear I will forget him.

He is – he was. He was quietly, beautifully, ecstatically subtle, and men do not remember subtlety. I feel I must record, although there are no proper words for it, the thousand meanings of a smile. The way he held his jaw. The fine sheen of iridescent hair at the nape of his neck. The bright white scar at the edge of his right temple, a souvenir of amateur boxing. The peculiarly poetic way his mouth fell slightly open when he listened to music. These are the things I would remember him for. These are the things no one ever saw but myself. These are the things I can tell no one of.

I have been told that in Greek, a far more delicate language than English, they have three words for love, representing its hairline variations, but I do not know those three words, and I am afraid to learn them.


	14. Uranians and Fools

**From the Hiatus Era Writings of Dr. John H. Watson**

**Chapter Twelve**

**Uranians and Fools**

London. Evening. March thirty-first of 1883.

_Uranian love is natural_, the pamphlet very plainly read. _It is an original form of the natural drive, a form of it that is healthy and pure to the core. For that reason, Uranian love is no form of "degeneracy," "abomination," or "baseness of character," things about Uranian love which the writings of the professors truly are filled with. Especially in our century. In the past one it was partly otherwise. For that reason it also has nothing to do with willful deviation from nature or with rejection of its laws. Uranians are born that way and for this very reason are following a natural law, namely a natural law to which their love drive is subjected. They follow a natural law exactly as non-Uranians do. For _this very reason_ it has nothing to do with mental disorder. Also, no one should worry -- it is not contagious!_

For several long moments I stood and blinked. There seemed to be nothing more to do. I had found the pamphlet lodged between the cushions of the sofa, seemingly left there carelessly by some uninterested hand. There were some notations in pencil around the paragraph, in Holmes's very distinctive writing. Over "it is not contagious," Holmes seemed to have scrawled something barely legible. It had, however apparently been written with extreme passion, as the pencil has actually gone clear through the paper, leaving a hole of some noticeable size.

Uranian love. Being a man of medicine, I was not unfamiliar with the term. It characterized a sodomite. To put it into blunt terms, a man who took men to his bed, going directly against the teachings of almost every major religion in existence, not to mention British law. And in any case, morals generally. I knew and still know it to be inherently immoral. Why? I could not tell you why. There is the Bible which seems to point towards it, there are all the laws of fidelity and not coveting what one can never have, and yet none of these laws seem to change, or even to slightly modulate, the certainty of this pamphlet that romantic love between men was the most natural thing in the world.

But that was not the really bothersome thing, and the really bothersome thing was beginning to nag furiously and disquietingly at the back of my mind. _What was this pamphlet doing at number two hundred and twenty one Baker Street, upper floor, stuck between cushions of a sofa like a child's hidden sweets? _

My mind coasting along predetermined lines, without effort from myself, I considered that Holmes must have a client who was being blackmailed in some way. Perhaps I am not perceptive, as he has said upon numerous occasions, or perhaps, as I now believe, the truth is simply that I did not wish to know what in the back of my mind, in the very secret places of my mind, I already did know, and had known for years.

_Do you suppose he knows about you, John Watson? Do you suppose he does?_ The terrible voice at the back of my mind, the one we all have, that mocks us as though we are only its unruly children, whispered hideous words to me. I did not know what to think. What had I to hide from him, or from anyone? I was not a Uranian. I never had been. After all, I am a doctor of medicine. If I possessed such an unhealthy propensity, any sort of an unfortunate inclination towards it, I am sure that I would be quite aware of such a thing. So it was not that that I prayed he had not deduced, in that infamous way of his, any indecent feelings I might possess. God help me, no.

It was the fact that I had, from the very beginning, when we first met, looked upon him in something of a different light than any other man I knew. He was a breed unto himself, an entire other species of mankind. Angular and lanky, almost disquietingly so, he eternally appeared to be something alien, what with his ever present painfully defined skeleton. His personality only confirmed the impression of otherness, sarcastic and almost demeaning, though always chivalrous towards women, and yes, possessing a certain tendency upon occasion, towards the effete, but a tendency that always was mitigated by his love for fencing and boxing, he seemed as though he had carved out a third sex in the medical journals. Not quite male, not quite female, not quite anything at all.

Peculiarly enough, I believe at first it was the desire to please and impress him that led to the disturbing change in my affections. I wanted only, throughout that first mystery, that of the Drebber murder, in which we were both engaged, only to impress upon him that I was intelligent as well, that I could be of some assistance or help. I do not know if he believed my constant assertions, but I know that they were made in earnest. When another human being appears to scorn us in every way, the only result is that we keep returning, either for more scorn coupled with a slap on the wrist or for a pat on the head and a biscuit with jelly. So it was, then, that although his scorn of me was never quite complete, I continuously returned, almost begging for his approval. I admired him, and still admire him, as I have admired no one who ever came before or after him. No assertion, be it of immorality or aught else, can convince me not to hold him in such high esteem.

There was an instinct, while Holmes lived, that arose in people who had known him for any length of time. That instinct was a supremely illogical desire to protect him. Both Mrs. Martha Hudson and myself once possessed it in abundance. He was so very fragile in appearance, with the bones in his face so clear as to make one aware of the skull beneath the skin. It was as though human instinct would take over, possessing his acquaintances with a strong desire to accommodate him with anything that he might need, lest he be in pain or in difficulty. It is in this way, I think, that I came to think of him in such a very peculiar way. As though he were not only my friend, but also something closer. Certainly not a lover, no, nothing of that sort, but as someone who was almost an extension of myself. At times I could feel the two years of age I had over him very palpably, indeed at times he seemed so young that he was almost a child, and then at other times he seemed infinitely old and battered with cynical age.

I wanted to shelter him. Is that so damning? I wanted to be near to him, or if not him, than to anyone, it hardly mattered, it never had mattered. Why should everyone live their lives as isolated piece on a great chess board? What is the greater meaning behind living as though the rest of the universe is blind to what we want, to what we are? We are all human, and as such need each other. Or perhaps some of us need a complement to their own natures, the Jekyll to the others Hyde, the stolidity to our wildness.

My only defense is that need, and it is a slim defense, but I will stand by it until my dying day.

"So you seemed to have solved my problem for me," Holmes said dryly. "My congratulations, or perhaps condolences, or perhaps both."

I spun around and there he was, draped like a pinned up skeleton in the doorframe that separated his bedroom from the parlor, still in his dressing gown.

"I could call a porter, or Wiggins, if you like, to take your things and move them to different rooms," he offered helpfully. "I am sure you should like to leave. Do not worry, you needn't put yourself into the awkward position of having to ask to leave. The last time someone found me with that sort of literature in my possession they threatened to cut off my toes, slowly, one by one, and then eat them."

This horrified me sufficiently that I stopped my contemplations regarding the nature of love and human existence entirely. "Really?"

"No, of course not," he spat, half laughing. "Did you really think I hadn't made that up entirely just now?" Then his face sobered, and he looked at me like a man looks at his executioner. "So. I take from the fact that you still seem to trust me enough to believe that ridiculous story that you are not about to pack your luggage and move somewhere respectably far away. That much is good, I suppose, although probably not for me, and probably not, in the long term, for you, so who it is good for other than our landlady's purse is really quite beyond me."

"Holmes…"

"Don't say anything, please." He raised one hand. "Don't _say _anything. At least allow me the dignity of explaining myself." He did not look at all dignified though, he looked defeated and utterly alone, in that poor tragic mouse colored dressing gown with the frayed hem and the acid stains all over the sleeves. There was almost a concave quality the way he stood, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. "Watson, I hope you are not quite so dim as to not be aware of the implications of the paper you are holding in your hands."

"No," I answered guardedly, after a long pause on both of our parts. "Not quite so dim as all that, Holmes."

A good chronicler is always watching, and there I was watching him again. Mystifying, awful, but totally fascinating, the way his head fell forward on his neck, the way the bones of his shoulders aligned themselves.

"Well, I am very glad that you are not quite so dim," he said, and sighed, and shook his head, stepping forward into the parlor and collapsing down onto the settee. "I really have no idea what to do. I _am_ sorry, old fellow, that it all had to turn out so very, very messily. It is entirely my fault." One hand on his knee, his forehead fell into his empty white palm. "I did not mean to cause anyone any undue distress, you may have my word as far as that goes. For what it's worth, in any case."

"Holmes, you and I are both perfectly aware that your word means the world to me."

"Still? That's silly of you. Oh, well." He could not help it, his sense of humor came through and I saw the old familiar charming smirk, one of the thousand nuances of expression that Mr. Sidney Paget seems to miss no matter how I describe it to him. "The explorers do tell us that the world is getting smaller."

"Smaller ever day," I said, looking down at him to where he sat below me on the sofa. "Shrinking as we speak. I wonder how much smaller it will have to get before we all crash into each other and suffocate."

It was beginning to occur to me how very, very small two bedrooms and a parlor really are. Two hundred and twenty one Baker Street, upper floor, is really not a very big place at all. At the very least, it is small enough to feel stifling, cramped and awkward when one is in the proper situation with the proper person.

His eyes flickered in my direction. I was beginning to regret a terribly large amount of things. "Suffocate, will we?"

"It is an entirely plausible possibility."

"Stop talking," he snapped suddenly, and put his other hand to his head in utter distress. With a sense of nightmarish detachment I watched as the two pale hands sluiced paths through his black hair. I felt adolescent again, as though I once more was going through that time in one's young life when one feels as though the whole world is observing you, and only you, and that your every move is quite ripe for criticism. In accordance with his order, I did not speak.

Instead, my brain ran the facts over and over in my mind, until they had been worn as smooth as a river stone, incongruous and strange as dancing cats, but certain, and real. A fixed point. Sherlock Holmes was possessed of, if not a client with an inclination towards it, than a very real inclination himself, towards sodomy, a criminal act and an immoral one. He seemed very matter of fact about this. Ethically and morally, as an upright citizen of the kingdom of Queen Victoria Regina, I was no doubt obligated to tell…someone. Someone in some sort of official position. And what would I tell them? Something or other, no doubt. Or was I obligated? What was the situation? Why – why –

His mere presence invited over rationalization. He was Sherlock Holmes. It was everything he stood for. Rational thought – questions – questions – questions I had never even considered before were suddenly uppermost in my mind. Nothing seemed to be a given any longer. If someone had told me that two and two added up to five I most likely should have accepted it. (This may be taken as a natural consequence of living in a flat where the cigars are in the coal scuttle and the letters are stabbed into the mantelpiece with a jack knife.)

"What are you thinking about, Watson?"

He was looking at me, his head cocked like a bird's, with an almost mischievous appearance to him.

"I was – I was thinking about deeper issues of human morality."

"Were you really?"

"Yes."

"Sit down."

I sat down. I hope the reader will forgive me for what they may see as a fault or as weakness of character when I say that it is extremely difficult to refuse a direct demand from Sherlock Holmes.

"Look at me."

I did so. I had never seen his face more serious. Holmes could contemplate the life or death stories of his fellow human beings with a cheerful smile on his face, but a simple matter that did not puzzle even the most base creatures of the gutter confounded him so completely as to almost render the effect charming. His black brows were knit in an expression of intense thought, and when coupled with the haggard spaces below his sharp cheekbones and the dark half moons under both his eyes, he looked almost cadaverous.

"I have to say, I have seen you look better, Holmes."

He laughed. I could almost feel his breath on my face. "I _have_ looked better. Unfortunately not _much_ better, but better nevertheless. Well, the reasoning behind my current disheveled state is the bizarre condition addressed in this pamphlet." Holmes gestured weakly at the bundle of papers I was still clutching. Well, I had to admit that that answered several questions I had been pondering at length. "I do not think I agree with this gentleman. He is very sentimental, and tends towards assuming we are all still denizens of ancient Athens." And the great detective, who had not slept so much as a half an hour in the past two days, yawned so deeply that his jaw cracked like a gunshot.

"Holmes, I mean nothing personal whatsoever, and I hope this is not to the detriment of your emotions –"

"Ha!"

"- but for pity's own sake, go to bed."

Holmes tilted precariously back to lean against the cushions of the sofa. Resting his head along the ridge of it, he bent his head to look at me sharply out of the corner of one gray eye. "For pity's own sake, I believe that I shall."

I watched his hands trail on the air as he rose. It was ridiculous, the way they seemed to catch my eye. His hands were like a primer, an essential manifestation, of what he was. Pale and thin and seeming to be tied together only with bits of string, and yet simultaneously riveting in their strength and surety. At least, they were such usually. Now, they seemed sadly misbegotten, as though they really might fall to pieces at any moment. His strength was gone for a moment, as he stood over me, looking down at me with a twisted shadow of the masterfulness of old.

"So do you plan to stay?" He asked, pulling me abruptly out of my contemplations. "You would not, if you were wise."

"Yes, I plan to stay." I shrugged, displaying a nonchalance he did not feel. "What does it matter? It is just as though you had told me you had a cold, or something equally medical. It is purely clinical. Let us be modern, Holmes."

"Yes indeed," he snapped, "clinical, and only that. Let us not be insensible! It's only logic! It only makes sense if understood in such a very, very unemotional manner. Clinical indeed!"

I rose to correct myself, and perhaps to do God knows what else, but the door had already slammed behind him, and I was shut out once more from the incomprehensibly complicated mind and heart of Sherlock Holmes.

I fell back once more onto the settee, mind, body and heart all pulling in different directions. I felt as though I were three men in one, and all three all desiring to go their different ways.

I thought of the things I had been taught, or morals and of the higher truths of human existence. Perhaps they are still foolish things to think of. I thought of childhood, and catechism class, and Sunday school.

_What is thy only comfort in life and death?_

_That I with body and soul both in life and death am not my own…_

_Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.__1_

I thought that I could hear his breathing through the door.

1 The quotes are, respectively, from the Heidelberg catechism and Psalms.


	15. The Solicitor of Sodom

**Chapter Thirteen**

**The Solicitor of Sodom**

I sat numbly in my usual armchair, wondering with a desperate calmness what to do. Every bone in my body seemed to scream for me to get away – out of this tiny domestic, unrealized Sodom and Gomorrah – but a less concrete and visceral part of me chipped away at the obvious reaction. I refused to articulate my mind's secret doubting murmurs, instead making a definitive effort to place my thoughts upon a more sensible track.

Why had Holmes left such a damning piece of literature in plan view out upon the settee? The sheer illogic of the thing was what truly puzzled me. If Holmes did indeed possess such a secret, then it was surely unlike him to leave concrete evidence of it lying about. It simply not an intelligent thing to do, and if there was ever an intelligent man, it was undoubtedly Holmes.

What if it had been Mrs. Hudson who had found the pamphlet and not myself? I had to admit that I knew our landlady nothing like well enough to be able to determine what her reaction to such an awful piece of news might be. Had it been anyone but Holmes, her reaction would have been simple to predict. She would summarily throw him out, and possibly myself as well in order to be safe about it. But this – this was Sherlock Holmes! He had never been just any tenant, and I knew that the affection she harbored for her volatile, charming boarder went far beyond the simply mutual indifference between a gentleman and his loyal but unobtrusive housekeeper. I sometimes fancied that she looked upon us almost as though we were the sons she had never had – and especially Holmes. I, after all, conducted myself more or less in the conventional adult manner. Holmes, however, could sometimes behave as though he had not yet passed the age of twelve. His meals were irregular, his habits unruly, and his hours had always been, to say the very least, markedly odd. Like a cat, he tended to spend large portions of the day sleeping unless there was something more interesting to do. It was, in any event, a lucky thing that I, and not some less understanding agent, had discovered the pamphlet.

None of this explained the really important and disquieting question. Why had he left it there in plain sight? Sherlock Holmes was not the sort of man to do such a foolish thing, no matter what faith he had in me. No one has such faith in their friends. No one could tell such a horrific, horrendous secret, unless it was in a repentant and guilt ridden manner. And Holmes knew that the pamphlet would give away his secret.

_When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth._

I was using his own maxim against him, and using it well, although not necessarily to my advantage. It was impossible that he had not known that I would divine his secret from the pamphlet. It was therefore impossible that he had not desired that I should discover this secret.

_He wanted me to know._

A frightening idea to say the least. What did it mean? What could it mean? For him, and for me, and more importantly, for the both of us, for the peculiar partnership, that had sprung up here at number two hundred and twenty one Baker Street, upper floor? I pondered the question for a long time, longer, I admit, than I meant to, for when I was finally jerked out of my introspection it was by Mrs. Hudson's distinctive knock on the door.

"Doctor Watson! Doctor Watson!"

I jumped up, as though I had been guiltily caught at some illicit activity, managing in the process to knock over the fireplace poker with a great clang. I cursed the air blue, then called out an apology for cursing to the estimable landlady. "I'll just be a moment, Mrs. Hudson," I added frantically as I set the poker back in its customary place. "I knocked over the poker, I'm afraid."

"Is anything broken?"

"No, nothing's broken. It's only that you startled me, that's all." I dusted off my hands and straightened up, feeling like an abashed child.

Our landlady entered with a measure of trepidation, no doubt expecting to see black ash spilling out onto her good hearth rug, but her eyes were thankfully spared that particular ordeal. I had the prudence to stuff the pamphlet into one pocket of my waistcoat before she got much further into the room and could catch sight of it.

"So, Doctor," she inquired, her eyes raking the room for anything suspicious. "Will you two be wanting dinner?"

"Mr. Holmes is asleep, I'm afraid," I replied, embarrassed. "And I think I – yes, I think I shall take my dinner at Simpson's."

"Too good for me again, sir," the lady chuckled good naturedly. "Oh, don't you worry," she added before I could contradict her, "I understand perfectly. Well, good evening, Doctor."

She had started for the doorway when I stopped her again, a new thought forming in my mind. If I did not fully understand Holmes's motives – why, I only knew of one man who might understand them better than I, and that was a man I knew only through letters – one Mr. Bertram Theophilus.

"Mrs. Hudson, do you think it would be a great trouble for you to send a wire to the post office for me?"

"No, not at all, Doctor," she replied, somewhat surprised. "Do you have it ready?"

"Well, no, but I could in just one moment – do you mind waiting?"

"Not at all, naturally not," the good lady answered, laughing sweetly at me. "You know, Doctor Watson, you have a tendency towards being far, far too kind towards people. Go on, take as long as you like. I have all the time in the world, you know that."

I believe I blushed, but was quick to make my way to my writing desk to dash off a message. I found Mr. Theophilus's address under a pile of bills and other necessary financial trappings – it had been the best way to hide the address from Holmes, as he generally did not concern himself with such things – and swiftly copied it down for Mrs. Hudson and the post office's benefit.

To: Mr. Bertram Theophilus

From: Dr. John Hamish Watson

Regarding: The health of our mutual friend, Mr. Holmes

Sir, it is my belief that Mr. Holmes is unwell STOP Wishing to question you as to the possible cause, as am baffled STOP Feel it is my obligation as his doctor of medicine STOP Would you be willing to meet with me for a late dinner at Simpson's-in-the-Strand in order to discuss his continued good health QUERY Hoping this is not too immediate STOP

I supposed it was true. As Holmes's doctor, I had to take a purely clinical interest in this particular problem. At this juncture, it was simply a necessity.

Mrs. Hudson was duly dispatched with the telegram, and I was left to fret ineffectually over the response – or, more disturbing, lack of response – that Mr. Theophilus might give me.

Mr. Bertram Theophilus had first written to me in 1881, the year I first took up residence with Holmes, and I still have his original letter. I now look upon it almost pleadingly, as though Holmes could perhaps be resurrected from the single ink stained and spattered page. Apparently, Mr. Theophilus had been one of Holmes's friends during his days at university, and was now curious as to what had become of him. Why he did not write to Holmes himself instead of I puzzled me at first, but then I realized his reasoning. Besides being far too benevolent than could be good for anyone, ever, Mr. Bertram Theophilus was also painfully shy. It is better to let his own words speak for themselves, I think, and here is the letter.

Most Respected Sir, (the letter began)

I hope you do not think me too presumptuous is writing to you. It has recently come to my attention that you are the flatemate and close friend of my former acquaintance and schoolfellow, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. We were at Oxford together – or rather, he was at Oxford. I myself had been removed from the university for some unfortunate circumstances in my first year, but lacked the funds or the energy to move from the great university town.

Mr. Holmes was friendly with our unruly group of expelled layabouts more or less by association. He was great friends with one Mr. Victor Trevor, one of our number, with whom he had only established a rapport because Trevor's dog, Swinburne, had dug his teeth into Mr. Holmes's poor ankle on their way to chapel one Sunday. Nevertheless, I grew to like Holmes very much, and I believe he was moderately fond of me. However, Doctor Watson, as you must know, Mr. Holmes has always possessed a certain aloofness of nature, and all that held true during his days at university. I was never sure whether the goodwill he demonstrated towards me was born out of fondness or out of pity, as I was an extremely awkward and clumsy young man. Regardless, however, I find myself thinking of him often, and for this reason have decided to contact you to discover how he does.

To own the complete truth, it is not only for this reason that I write to you. I have experienced something of an upheaval of my domestic life in this past year, and as a result thereof, my wife and I have been separated. This caused me much distress, as could be imagined, and I began to consider when the last time was that I had been truly happy. After much pondering, I realized, and I hope you will not laugh at me – that the one and only time of true happiness in my life had been during those years in the town of Oxford, when we all fancied ourselves poets, and believed irrevocably in everything. I therefore made it my business to seek out the men I had known during these years, in order to discover whether they had met such sorry fates as I. They had not. One, a flamboyant Frenchman, had fulfilled his ambitions towards becoming an artist. Another, having desired all his life to become a poet, was starving happily like a true Bohemian in a Paris garret, precisely as he had always wanted to. I alone had never realized the so called silly and impractical dreams of my youth. I alone, indeed, had ever married, and I alone was now so utterly on my own in the world. Certainly Trevor had become a perfectly respectable businessman, married and all, but then, we had always known that was his true calling. In this manner, I discovered all of them had found their niche in the world.

Except for one. And that was, of course, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The year at this time was 1880, and Mr. Holmes kept very much to himself in a small set of rooms at Montague Street. I attempted in vain to get up the nerve to write to him, and, failing that, instead for a time periodically checked in upon him, so that I might see how he did. Imagine my surprise when news came to me that Sherlock Holmes, ever the solitary creature, had taken a flatemate and – so it seemed – a friend. Having known Mr. Holmes, I was well aware that if he had tolerated the company of a man for any length of time, then he must like that man very much, unless Mr. Holmes has changed rapidly since I knew him. Being, I confess, less intimidated by you than by Mr. Holmes, I have resolved to write to you.

How, may I ask, is my old friend? Does he do well or no? Can my worries be alleviated? Does his business do well, whatever it is, and was he ever able to turn that fascination with crime into a job, as he always said he would? Please, Dr. Watson, do write to me, but do not tell Mr. Holmes of my imposition. I should not like him to be bothered, and far less would I like for him to think me rude.

I thank you for your concern, and I remain, yours apologetically,

Mr. Bertram Theophilus

Postscript: You must forgive me for writing to you instead of coming to call. I am afraid that I have taken sick, and ought not to be moved.

As you can see, Mr. Theophilus is not a terribly outgoing man. His terrified postscript is proof enough of that. Despite the fact that our correspondence continued for three years, he never once called on me in the flesh. Each letter contained some reason for this – his old mother was visiting, he was far too busy with work – although what work, he did not or would not say, or perhaps he was once more sick. It soon became clear that Mr. Theophilus suffered not from an overly busy schedule, nor from sickness, but from terminal shyness.

I wrote him a response assuring him that Holmes was perfectly fine, and would no doubt continue so, but the letters persisted, arriving each month like clockwork and inquiring as to the state of my friend and companion. Over time, I slowly became more willing to watch him, as though closer observation might further inform my monthly letters. It made me feel mysterious and covert, almost like Holmes himself. I knew something he did not, and this happened so extremely rarely that I preserved my advantage so well that he earnestly believed I had no secrets at all. Soon enough, I so enjoyed the feeling of superiority that surveying his movements gave me that I did so whenever possible. Whenever he was in a room, you might be sure that the sea novel I appeared to be perusing did not really have my full attention. In reality, I was perusing _him._

It is surprising, what one notices when one chooses to watch. Holmes is, of course, a champion of the art of observation, and I have been something of his disciple. I do not have his superior analytical skill, but I do have two good eyes in my head, and for this reason I began to notice things which I never would have otherwise. Holmes has a habit invisible but to the close and purposeful observer, of twitching at his sleeves, be he in evening wear or ratty dressing gown, so that he could nervously scratch at his wrists. His wrists were so disquietingly thin, with their thin blue tracework of veins. He stood like a dancer in the ballet, his heel cradled in the arch of his other foot, and his hands constantly moved as though to play the violin, even when there was no violin in them. His hands were very white, and very soft, and his touch was imperceptibly delicate.

But enough of that. In any case, I soon found myself at Simpson's, awaiting what was to be my first meeting with Mr. Bertram Theophilus. He had not answered my urgent telegram as of yet, so I could only sit and wait, in an agony of uncertainty, until he might arrive. The idea that he simply might not come was maddening, so frightening that I refused to think about it.

Yet even so, he did arrive. I had, upon the basis of his letters, developed an impression of a small, ratty man with a dusty overcoat and small, slitted eyes. Instead, I met a very nervous, twitching gentleman with a soft, frightened voice and enormous eyes that were blue and yet somehow owlish, half hidden behind horn rimmed glasses. He was meticulously dressed. His hair was wispy and white blond, and had gone uncut for too long, so that it stuck out of his hatband at peculiar angles. He looked slightly disheveled despite his well dressed appearance, and the overall effect achieved was that of a person who was a sort of gentle watercolor on the world. Everything about him was soft. Although he would have to be at least equal in age to Holmes, Mr. Theophilus looked very young, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, and his shaking, ink stained hands only corresponded to the impression of a frightened student.

I offered him a seat immediately, and he politely accepted, with a childish word of thanks. "Dr. Watson, sir," he began, his light voice shaking like a leaf in the wind, "I'm terribly sorry, sorry to be late - it was not my intention, of course - but I found that -"

"Calm yourself," I entreated him as warmly as I could given the state of my nerves, disarmed by the eager to please attitude of my erstwhile correspondent. "Please, sir, don't worry. It's quite all right, really. There is no harm done at all. Sit down, please, and make yourself comfortable."

"I'm very sorry to be so...apologetic," Theophilus began, a wry smile peeping out from beneath his flustered exterior. "I have had rather a mad dash of a day, I fear. I received your telegram rather late - the messenger stayed at my rooms until I arrived, God bless him - and as soon as I read it I rushed straight here. Please, do tell me everything."

"It will wait for the moment," I replied, tucking a napkin into my collar. "For now, Mr. Theophilus, let us take our dinner. Please, order whatever you like, I shall cover the bill. No, don't sputter, sir, it's quite my pleasure. Ah, here is the waiter. Please do peruse the menu. Allow me to recommend the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding." And so I prattled on about foolish subjects, all the while thinking in the back of my mind, _What manner of man is it that stands before me? A sinner, a gentleman, a unique medical problem..._There was no doubt in my mind that he shared my friend's less than unique propensities. _And perhaps...perhaps...if they had known each other at university...there is no avoiding it, sodomy is practically an institution at Oxford..._

Bertram Theophilus, blissfully ignorant of the lines upon which my mind ran, was indeed perusing the menu, and we were soon tucking into a fine dinner of the recommended roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. After a short time, I mustered my courage enough to breach the true subject - the pamphlet, of course, which I had found upon our settee.

"Mr. Theophilus, sir?"

He looked up from his plate, fork half suspended. He had been eating ravenously, as though he did not have the chance to do so very often. "Yes?"

"Mr. Holmes's health..."

"Yes..." He sat up attentively, pushing his slender shoulders back. "Please, tell me everything that has taken place."

"I shall." I took a deep, strengthening breath, and began in earnest. "Well, Mr. Theophilus. Have you ever heard of a Mr. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs?"

The other man dropped his fork. It fell with a loud clang against his plate. For a moment, the fear in his eyes was enormous, all encompassing - it seemed almost animal. I was to grow to recognize that fear, both in myself and in others. "So," he sighed, the big blue eyes brimming with resigned sadness, " you have found out for certain what I had always suspected. Well. I hope you will not make trouble," he continued ruefully, "although to any real law abiding Englishman, not making a scandal of this is a ridiculous and immoral idea. Peculiar, isn't it, that Mr. Holmes seeks to safeguard the law, and yet breaks it with his very nature. I suppose you heard of Mr. Ulrichs from him, then, and were so intelligent as to put two and two together."

"No. I found one of his works."

Mr. Theophilus whistled through his teeth. "Upon Mr. Holmes's person?"

"No, upon Mr. Holmes's settee."

"He always was indiscreet," said Mr. Theophilus wistfully, and I could not help but wonder if we were speaking of the same man. The Sherlock Holmes I knew was the most discreet man in the world.

"I intend no scandal," I assured him, discovering the truth of this as I said it, "No scandal at all. I only want - to understand -"

"Why he has allowed you to discover this."

I nodded vigorously, once more discovering the truth in the act of its expression. My roast beef was by this time utterly forgotten. "Yes. It...well...it is very..."

"I take your meaning," Mr. Theophilus pushed his chair back from the table. "I certainly do. I had always suspected it, but it was never entirely clear. Often somewhat, but never...never entirely. It was a nature shared by a majority of our friends in university - all but Trevor, oddly enough. Mr. Victor Trevor, if you recall my mentions of him in my letters. He was quite in love with women, although he did, like most of the Oxford boys, indulge in what the Russians term 'manly games.'" Suddenly, his nerves seemed to desert him. "We all did." He laughed, but then all his nerves returned. "I am sorry. That was far too loud. I. Well, it is a common schoolboy practice – no doubt one you have encountered yourself, doctor."

For the first time, he looked up and genuinely caught my eye, holding my gaze unabashedly in his. There was something inexplicably touching about this man, looking far younger than his years, with his whispy halo of white gold hair and his unashamed confession. It was made all the more exquisite by the fact that his very nature doomed him.

_His disease, _I reminded myself. _His madness._

I knew that his soft voice and solicitous manner were only so that we would not be heard. I _knew_ it, and nevertheless it did call back memories of public school, of the childlike fumblings of schoolchildren. My memories of that time are vague, soft, quiet, like a shrug in the dark, like sins excused, like action without consequence.

_Disease._

"You pity me," he observed, drawing me back into the present. "Do not. I do not tell you of myself in sadness. It is true, Doctor, that this is a dark and cold world for the third sex, as Ulrichs terms us. But understand sir, that we have our crusaders. Ulrichs is one. And we have our small victories. I am one. I confessed myself to my wife, who was prompt in seeking an annulment of our marriage on the grounds of my supposed impotency. So there is hope for Mr. Holmes yet. Perhaps someday, the Offenses Act will leave the minds of men, and I will not have to speak of this battle of ours. There is hope yet. There will always be hope."

"Only hope?"

"More than that. There are doctors – radical men, you understand – who have suggested that all men possess, at least in part, such a very damning propensity, though they may appreciate the charms of women just as much." Mr. Theophilus was looking intently at me. "Perhaps Mr. Holmes believes that these theories might be correct, and that is why he leaves the works of Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs lying about."

I stared down at my plate, and did not know what to say. "I. I had hoped there might be another explanation."

"Knowing Holmes as I once did – and mind you, I have not spoken at length with him in many years, so I do not know how he may have changed – I do not believe that there can be any other explanation." Mr. Theophilus toyed with his fork. "You know," he continued quietly, "I am not so unlike you. I have been a perfectly ordinary man for most of my life, Doctor Watson. It is only recently that I became so…" A subtle smile played across his chapped lips. "Bohemian. I had a wife once, and I _did_ love her, more than I can possibly say, and I had hoped that she would be able to love me as I was. Warts and all, as they say. Warts and all." His smile was wistful now, and inescapably sad. "But she was the love of my life, you know. Love is peculiar in that way. At a certain point, inclination ceases to matter."

"Does it?" I stiffened in my seat, feeling horridly awkward. How does an upstanding, moral man from the Scottish Highlands fall into such a conversation? "So. You imply that you agree with the radical doctors you spoke of earlier. At least upon the subject of human inclination."

"I do." He shrugged lightly. Bertram Theophilus did everything lightly, moving with a kind of gawky grace. "And I believe that your reaction to my way of thinking speaks volumes."

"I –"

"There is love, Doctor Watson, and there is love. We choose both, or one, or neither. Some of us are forced into it, some away from any. It is the way, sad as it may be, of this human race that we are part of." Mr. Theophilus sighed. "I am sorry to distress you, Doctor. After all, you are not a cheerfully damned hedonist like myself." He laughed. "Although I was once made in your very image. A fine, eligible London gentleman bachelor with an Oxbridge education. Soon, a fine London gentleman husband, but then, of course things changed." His smile was a sun I could not reach. "I have shed my past and present. I have not measured out my life in cups of tea and society visits for longer than I can count, now. I'm naked and proud before the British law, and I am not afraid." He grinned, perfect and dangerous. "I have faced the gates of the city of Sodom and come back alive. What else is there to cause me fear?"

"Henry Labouchere,"1 I said. It was all I could say.

"When we make our exile from London's ghettos and brothels," Theophilus replied, his smile a shining knife, "Henry Labouchere will be Lot's wife, and he will look back upon all the things so uniquely stuffy and Puritanical, and he will be turned to a pillar of salt."

In my silence, Mr. Theophilus rose, nerves gone, to be replaced with a sort of sublime certainty. "I see I have distressed you. I'll –"

"No." I motioned him to sit down. "Not at all. Please, stay…Would you fancy a game of chess?"

I took my leave of Mr. Bertram Theophilus in the tight corridor just outside of his small and impoverished rooms. He gave me a faint, almost pitying smile, and then ran two graceful, ink-stained fingers over the line of my jaw, tracing the sensitive place below my ear. His hand might have been made of fire, for I gave a little gasp of shock, and he laughed. "A pleasure, I'm sure," he grinnned politely, pressing one of my hands in both of his, and reached up to press his lips to my cheek. They were chapped and warm, like the feathers of a baby bird.

"I wish you luck," Mr. Theophilus told me, and disappeared.

I walked home frantically, sure that the blazing brands upon my cheek and jaw were as clear to all of London as they were to me.

1 A politician famous for his restrictive actions in sodomy law. In modern parlance, a homophobe.


	16. The Greater Fools

Significant changes have been made to the end of Chapter Thirteen. Please go back and read them before continuing. Also, while there will be some stuff of a bedroom variety in the next chapter, I have a slight gap in story between then and Watson's marriage. If anyone has anything they'd like to toss in there, please do. I may just use it.

**Chapter Fourteen**

**The Greater Fools**

London. Evening. March thirty first of 1883.

"Good afternoon," Holmes said stiffly, hesitating towards me in the frame of the door.

"It's getting on, Holmes," I replied good naturedly from my reclining position on the settee, "It's really nearer to evening now. Although you'd hardly know, having slept all day."

"Don't talk about irrelevant things," he retorted. "Life is far too unimportant to spend it discussing the irrelevant."

"It's good to see you," I said quietly, surprised that it was true.

"What? Why?" He jerked off his gloves with little spasmodic motions, lying them absently upon the side table. "I shouldn't think that you would feel that way. Improper, really, all things considered. Simply improper."

"Holmes, you can hardly be called a man based in propriety. By extension then, I suppose nor am I."

"I have never had a proper friend. I do not think I ever shall." Holmes settled into his customary position across from my own armchair. It suddenly struck me as amusing, the degree to which things, no matter how bizarre they became, tended to stay the same. "I tend, as you know, to disconcert people."

"Oh, not so much. Cigarette?"

He accepted my offer, then scrabbled about on the mantelpiece for matches. When they had been duly retrieved, he rolled two cigarettes and handed one to me. I pressed his hand in thanks, in response to which he convulsively pulled it away, with a little hissing gasp as though I had hurt him. His hands were very warm, which was utterly unlike him, and he was sweating, which was far more unlike him.

"Holmes, are you well?"

"I have a clinical mental disorder," he said nastily, "if you'll recall yesterday morning's altercation."

"You mean this morning's altercation?"

"Was that only this morning? Good heavens. I had thought it was a few days ago, at the very most." The match rasped against the side table as he tried without success to light it.

"It _was_ only this morning."

"Was it really?" He laughed, a tiny amount of his old cheerfulness returning to his face, like color in the pale skin of a corpse. He looked very pale indeed. I could almost see a blue vein, like lace or embroidery, tracing the edge of one temple. "It seems as though it was forever."

"Forever, Holmes?" I replied, in a desperate and unsuccessful effort to lighten the mood. "Forever is a dreadfully long time."

"Dreadfully indeed." He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. "Dreadfully indeed, I think. You know, it has been two years since the Drebber murders. That seems as though it was forever as well."

"The Drebber murders? Oh, good Lord. Yes, it has been, hasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I am privileged to have so endured in your esteem."

"_You're _privileged. Ha. You know, much as it may shock you, there are not many men in London willing to tolerate so very eccentric and violently odd a flatemate."

"And friend." I gestured empathetically with my cigarette.

"Yes, and friend." He stared up at the ceiling, blowing contemplative smoke rings at it. "Is there any new correspondence?"

There. He had hit upon precisely what I had wanted him to, thank God. Sometimes, when he was in one of his infamous black moods, he would fail to glance at the possible new mail for weeks at a time. "I don't think so. You might look under the jackknife."

"There will be nothing new there. I place the letters there myself."

"Or then again, there might be something. One never knows. Perhaps Mrs. Hudson has become adventurous and is finally endorsing your method keeping your letters together in one place."

"Or perhaps not." With a little groan, he rose and crossed lazily to the mantelpiece. "How is it that I'm still so very tired? I slept most of the day."

"I know, Holmes. This advent to your knowledge may well shock you, but I too do make my home here."

"You astound me," he said dryly, shuffling through the letters.

"I shouldn't like to bore you. _Are _there any new letters?"

"Now that you come to speak of it – there are. How peculiar. There is a letter here from one Mr. Bertram Theo – Bertram Theophilus!"

He wheeled 'round to look at me. I could not conceal my impish grin, much as I tried. "Watson, there is a letter here," he said, with a kind of fierce intensity the likes of which I had very rarely seen, "there is a letter here from one Mr. Bertram Theophilus, of whom I believe I have told you insofar as he was connected with Mr. Victor Trevor of the Gloria Scott case. Now, would it be possible for you to perhaps recount to me precisely how you came by this letter? I am very well aware that you have been to dinner at Simpson's today – you have got the record of a chess game sticking out of your front pocket, Watson – and I am very well aware that you had company, as is evidenced by the game of chess. Am I to deduce that this company took the form of Mr. Bertram Theophilus? And if so why did no one bother to tell me of it?"

"Holmes, Mr. Theophilus first wrote to me some years ago."

"What?" He demanded, more furious at himself for not realizing this than at me for my correspondence.

"Holmes," I cried, throwing one hand up in a gesture of defense, "You must allow me to have as many secrets from you as you have from me!" He subsided, almost looking a little ashamed. With a deep breath, I continued. "It seems that Mr. Theophilus worries for you."

"_Worries_ for me?" Holmes looked genuinely shaken. "He _worries _for me? Why should he worry for me? The last I heard of Theophilus, he was hiding in a family life."

"He is a regular Bohemian now," I said faintly, quoting the man's own description of himself.

"I should have expected no less of him, really, if I had thought reasonably," Holmes admitted. "I always said he had no bit of the artist in his soul, but he wanted it so very badly. It was always almost tragic." He sighed deeply. "So Theo is worried for me?'

_Theo. _That could hardly have been less like Holmes, to give anyone anything that might be considered a nickname. A clenching feeling made itself evident in my stomach, something almost like jealousy. "Very worried."

"Why?"

"He believes you are unhappy."

Holmes leaned against the mantelpiece, his long legs propped up like an unnaturally graceful scarecrow, cigarette persistently stuck into the corner of his thin-lipped mouth. The strong line of his jaw was somewhat obscured by the smoky tobacco haze, but the clear contours of his knifelike profile still came through wonderfully well. "He is correct in his deduction regarding my happiness," Holmes said softly, and I felt something like the pain of an old wound. "Perfectly correct, although it is possible, and indeed probable, that my unhappiness is in itself irrational. I have everything it is possible for a man of my sort to desire."

"That is incorrect, Holmes."

He had shut his eyes, and I stared at him without shame. What are great men made of? The same elements as the rest of us. The skin and the bone. I remembered terms from medical school, half in my unconscious now. Phalanges, tibia, fibula, radius…what did it matter what human creatures might be made of? "Incorrect," he repeated, the familiar voice unnervingly low. "Sherlock Holmes? Incorrect? I was last incorrect in. . .well, it must have been grammar school." He laughed.

It is for such moments that I have chosen to record these events. These moments, I know, are the moments I will someday forget. They are the moments I someday must forget, although they did at the time brand themselves into my memory. Simple, small and subtle things lead to the greatest changes and events of our lives.

"Perhaps you are incorrect more often than you assume."

"Or perhaps not."

After a moment, I said, "Sit down."

He laughed loudly, the gray eyes flying open. Then they fluttered closed again, and he subsided. After yet another long and tension laden moment, he opened them once more. "Really?"

"Yes. Sit down, won't you? You look regularly done."

He did finally, with a short little sigh. "I feel absolutely finished. I didn't sleep most of the day, to own the truth, I only dreamed. I don't sleep any more - I can't really, any longer. I lie there and I shut my eyes and then I dream of all sorts of things." Holmes yawned deeply. "But I always feel ten times more tired when I wake up, so whatever I am dreaming of, it would certainly seem to be strenuous."

"Now, this is merely a shot in the dark, but perhaps if you didn't keep such irregular hours - But I'm changing the subject." I knitted my hands together over my knee and looked levelly at him. For the first time in a long while, I was becoming disquietingly aware of the negative space between two people. It seemed so strange, that so much of the world should be occupied by nothing at all. Like in the famous optical illusion picture, I was utterly consumed by the vases between the faces.

"You are? I was not aware we were discussing any concrete matter."

"Your happiness."

Holmes raised one hand in an indignant gesture of impatience, but I caught it, and, a gently as I could manage, was about to lay it down on his knee when he yanked his hand away as though I had hurt him very badly, with a sharp, hoarse, painfilled whisper of, "Don't!"

"Holmes, did I -"

"No."

"Are you -"

"No."

"May I -"

"No."

He bent over his hand and nursed it as though I had really wounded him, but only for a moment. Then he looked back up abashedly at me, with something of the air of a kicked puppy.

"Oh, for pity's sakes," he declared bitterly, hanging his head again, "don't look at me like that. It drives me mad."

"I am frankly not surprised that your nerves are so very on edge. Holmes, when was the last time you allowed yourself to be calm?"

"You're not suggesting actual peacefulness and soundness of mind, are you?"

"Far be it from me," I said, and smiled. The smile felt strange on my face, strange because I knew it was improper, and strange because I now knew things that by rights should have banished all traces of a smile from my face. I found myself opening my mouth to add, "Are you likely to allow yourself to be calm at any time in the near future?"

"It is a highly unlikely prospect," sighed Holmes. "So," he began again, after a brooding moment, "you do not plan to find new lodgings?"

"Why should I? The price of rent is reasonable, the landlady is like a second mother, and I share these rooms with my greatest friend in the world."

He gave a short, rueful groan. "Is everything so simple in your eyes?"

I caught his eyes. "Holmes, you know that my loyalty is unconditional."

"A fact that I assure you will sooner or later be to both of our detriments." Holmes turned away from me, one hand coming to his brow in a gesture of despair. "God, I am undone."

"Holmes."

"Yes?"

"Now would be a terrible time to suggest optimism as an alternative, wouldn't it?"

"An absolutely terrible time, I'm afraid. None worse."

"Ah, well. I actually think optimism might behoove you at this point."

"Might it not?" He laughed again, bitterly this time. "Might it not?"

I tried another tack. "Holmes, why would you presume - for at first you did - that I planned to change lodgings?"

"Escape, I think, is how I would phrase it. I mean, look around you. This entire flat may as well be a death trap as far as you are concerned, my dear Watson."

"Why?"

He rose, violently now, and with sudden vehemence put out his cigarette on the table before him. "For heaven's sake, Watson. Don't mock me, I don't think I can bear that. Be repulsed, be revolted, show your good stoic British training, God help you, only don't joke with me about it. Or at me about it, rather. There is no one here who would appreciate that particular brand of humor."

"I was not being humorous, Holmes. I simply do not, cannot, see number two hundred and twenty one Baker Street, upper floor, as a death trap." I glanced down at Mr. Theophilus's letter, now slightly crumpled in one of his perfectly dexterous hands. "Holmes, Mr. Theophilus and I discussed many things."

"I have no doubt that Theo has all sorts of absolutely crackpot theories regarding my happiness, to say nothing of any nonexistent romantic liaison he imagines me having."

"He imagines nothing of the kind."

"Oh, doesn't he?"

"Au contraire, Holmes. He imagines that you desire a romantic liaison desperately, but are unable to achieve it."

Holmes tilted his head towards me and smirked, a hot fury growing in his eyes. His eyes were gray. I must never forget that his eyes were gray. "Well, then," he snarled, "who do you suppose is the bigger fool?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Is Theo the greater fool, for determining my thoughts and feelings through pure uncorroborated guessing and deliberation, or are you the true imbecile, Watson, for living three long years in my company and never thinking of it at all?" Holmes faced me with the only attitude he knew with which to confront a person. Belligerence, of course. Fencing and boxing had probably not been the most prudent things for his parents to give him to study.

"Ah. So. Perhaps I am the greater fool."

In the silence, the Truth reared its head. For a moment I was aware of a distinct feeling of missing being close to him - madness, of course. He was Sherlock Holmes. No one had ever been close to him. No one ever would be.

"Perhaps you're incorrect," Holmes said, and for a moment I thought he had read my thoughts. "Perhaps you are no fool. Do you think yourself a fool, John Watson?"

"Not particularly, no." I glanced down in what I a moment later realized was nervousness, and saw that my hands were shaking. Ruefully amused, I held one up for his examination. "It appears your nerves are contagious."

"I hope that it is as Mr. Ulrichs's pamphlet stated, and my other habits are not as well."

"To which habits do you refer? The tobacco, the odd hours, the morphine, the cocaine, the dictating of visitor's entire biographies as they walk through the door –"

"I think you realize which habits I refer to, Watson," Holmes said, and, exasperated and exhausted, sat back down again.

"Holmes?"

"Yes?"

"May I ask you a question?"

"May I point out that you already have?"

"Touché. What I mean to ask is this." I took a deep breath, afraid to my core of the answer I knew I would receive. "Why did you leave such a very damning pamphlet out in plain sight?"

He looked bluntly at me. "Well, isn't that much clear to you? It ought to be."

This would be one of the first times I had ever lied to him. "I am afraid that once again, you must explain the mystery to me."

"At least some things prefer not to change." He smiled for a moment, but then it crumbled off of his face like sand in surf. "I had only thought –" One finely formed hand gestured ineffectually at the air before him. He looked tragic, pathetic and alone. "I once harbored absurd plans of coming to some sort of mad – well, arrangement."

I had never seen him blush. Now he did, and vividly. Under different circumstances, I am sure I would have laughed. I did not laugh then, only stared at the scarlet brand across his high, unhandsome cheekbones, and I considered, and I thought. Thoughts were becoming tiring. How long had it been since I had arrested thought in favor of the instinct of something larger than the human intellect? It had been longer ago than I could count, when I was a younger man, more whole and less bitter and worldly. Perhaps ignorance is bliss. Had it not been for that pamphlet, I should never have considered all the mad possibilities that lurk just beneath the veneer of simplicity the world puts up.

"And you presume you will now never come to this arrangement?" I put a hand on his shoulder, and a shudder went through him as though I had hit him. I removed my hand.

"Please, Watson, I beg you, don't. No good could come of it."

"Your nerves might stop –"

"Oh God. Be quiet!" Holmes turned to face me full on, and I was jolted to see that there were tears standing in his eyes. I never saw him cry with grief. What I saw then seemed to be anger and fear. "I beg of you, Watson, shut up. Don't suggest things you have no idea of the meaning of."

I bristled. "No idea of the meaning of - do you think I'm a fool, Holmes?"

"I think you're an insanely loyal, kind, good man."

There was a long pause.

"It is," he concluded, "essentially the same thing."

"Then you are a fool too. We can both be fools together."

"If it is to be together, then," Holmes admitted, one hand uncurling to lie open on his gaunt knee, "there are worse things to be than fools."

I put my hand into his, and despite his half gasped, half muttered, "Don't touch me!" I refused to remove it. His hands were shockingly soft, and I felt clumsy and bumbling as I blindly ran my own up his arm to his thin shoulder.

"Look, please…please don't, you don't -" He trailed off, his eyes shut and his face twisted with guilt.

"Holmes," I pointed out, with what little capacity for rational thought I had left, "if I'm going to be completely frank, I have no doubt in my mind that it would be far, far, better for the both of us if you'd stop talking now."

With a sound not quite like a sob, he collapsed into me, and I into him, and his mouth found mine.

He tasted of smoke. The smell of tobacco and totally incongruous gunpowder. Stubble on his unshaven cheek and throat. The soft skin in the place between his neck and shoulder. The clammy nervous cold sweat on his hands. I had never been so near to him before. The closeness was, for no good reason, intoxicating. Why should it be so? There was no earthly reason. It was curiosity, charity, a favor to one of the most brilliant men of the age, not –

Why were we sitting here, two men embracing? Why did things seem so utterly mad, and yet in their very madness intrinsically right? I felt as though I knew too much. I had learned far too much. Like Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I had sold my soul to the Devil for knowledge, and what was there to do now but pray for ignorance?

I could not.

My willpower deserted me, and I could only press myself to him. Somewhere in me, where I was still thinking clearly, I knew how different this embrace was from one with a woman – he was frightening, disallowed, strong and weatherbeaten and endlessly more dangerous. There was something disquieting in the tenderness of his touch – like a tiger that thought it was a housecat – and yet he was raw, he was imperfect and combative and wonderful.

Holmes was still faintly, purposelessly mouthing words I could not understand, something vague and undefined about morals and Leviticus. It no longer mattered. The empty negative space had been filled, and for a moment, I was satisfied.

"Holmes," I said as best I could, the surname strange in my mouth now, "Don't go on."

I felt the string between us cut, the communion drop, and I crushed him more tightly in my arms. "Stop talking. That is what I meant."

"Ah," he said, and then he did not say anything at all.


	17. A Third Explanation

**A Third Explanation**

_By Maxwell Gabriel Neiman_

The following chapter chronicles a rather pivotal event – namely, the first occasion upon which both men violated the Offenses Against the Persons Act of 1861 together. Whether or not it was the first time that they did so separately is a matter of debate. Unfortunately, we only possess Mr. Holmes's account of this event, obscure and full of euphemism as it may be, as the pages of Dr. Watson's journal concerning their first intimacy seem to have been ripped out and burned in a fit of guilt, particularly as he makes reference later to his regret at destroying them.


	18. Dare Not Speak Its Name

**Chapter Fifteen**

**Dare Not Speak Its Name**

**From the Hiatus Era Writings of Sherlock Holmes**

London. Evening. March thirty first of 1883.

Nothing further took place at that time.

I realize that you may think that absurd, that you may believe that I, seeing an opening, dove for it, and fully indulged my own inverted desires.

This is not the case.

What I desire, yearn for, even, or crave, is not the point.

"Oh," said Watson, pulling his face away from mine and bringing one hand to his mouth as though to wipe the touch of mine away. "Oh," he said again, the tragic break in his voice almost painfully beautiful. I could not be certain from whence that break came, but when he pressed himself to me again, I almost fancied that it was because he felt something for me.

This was not the case, just as it was not the case that I felt anything but the most base and the most friendly emotions towards him.

"I am sorry," I attempted to say, but it was hardly speech as much as it was a moan. I felt weak, disconcertingly vulnerable, and empty, as though there was some enormous space in me that I had only just been made aware of. I held onto him more tightly. Perhaps I hurt him.

It does not matter now.

He took my face in his hands and pulled it towards his, pressing his lips to my cheeks, my neck, the hollow spot below my ear which I had never realized held such sensation. Sometimes I forgot that Watson was far more worldly than I.

"I – ah." Trying ineffectually to stop him, I pushed away, my hands on his chest. He only moved closer, a small, tortured sound escaping him. How long had it been since I did something merely for the sensation, only because it was physically pleasant? Pleasant was too weak a word, and yet…

"We mustn't," I finally managed.

"I know," Watson pointed out, fairly astutely.

"No, I know that, too. I was speaking in terms of locale. Mrs. Hudson could walk in at any moment."

As though on cue, there was a knock upon the door. Watson jumped away as though I had burned him, and I could not help giving a loud, nervous peal of laughter. He looked at me as though I had grown horns and a tail.

Now, I recognize that look. It was admiration, the way some ladies stare appreciatively at photographs of His Grace the Duke of Wellington.1 A pity I did not know it for what it was then.

But it does not matter now.

Watson dashed like a scalded dog into his room, and I was left in a rather flustered position. For various reasons of a somewhat awkward nature, when I called in Mrs. Hudson, I chose to stand behind the settee. This obscured my person from the waist down.

"Mr. Holmes?" She poked her head in, puzzled. Poor, dear lady.

"Ah, yes, Mrs. Hudson. What is it?"

"Telegram for you, Mr. Holmes. A Mr. Bertram Theophilus?"

"Ah. Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Hudson."

She proffered the paper, puzzled. "Mr. Holmes, will you be taking the telegram?"

"Yes, naturally…in a moment. I should not like to move. Leave it on the desk, thank you, Mrs. Hudson."

Puzzled, she did so. The poor, dear lady, as I said. Ignorance must truly be bliss in Mrs. Hudson's case.

Presently, I opened the telegram.

My dear Sherlock STOP, it said,

Have conversed at length with your flatemate and friend STOP He is quite charming STOP Congratulations on what I am certain you shall have achieved by the time this reaches you STOP He is quite in love with you STOP

Theo STOP

Eventually, I called Mrs. Hudson up to tell her that no, there would be no reply.

Time passed, as is its wont.

London. Late at night. April third of 1883.

One thing does lead to another, it is true, and time is a fluid thing. Those four days passed as though they had been years, with awkward glances at each other like two schoolboys attempting an illicit conversation during a lecture.

Eventually, time was found for things prohibited not only the English law, but by my own set of rules for myself.

Certain persuasion was found which induced me to temporarily relax the aforementioned rules.

The breath between my lips had never felt so pronounced. It was warm, and wet and sweet, and it came fast. I could not help it. Suddenly, the air seemed to possess a peculiarly thick quality, almost like honey or wine. Before, or just before, rather, as I fumbled inexpertly at the buttons on my shirt until he reached out to assist me, breathing had seemed an impossibility. The air caught in my throat, as though I might choke on it.

But later, though, when things had become suddenly natural and perfect, when place and time and even identity had been stripped away, breath came easily and sweetly. He was stronger than I had anticipated, although I knew that he was a fit man. Something in that strength was frightening. For a time I almost felt myself in danger, as though he might break me in half, naked alone and defenseless as I was. Simultaneously some clinical part of me registered that he was a medical man, and possessed all of their gentleness of touch. And he did.

It was a kindness I did not deserve, just as his very company has always been such, a privilege that I had not earned but still refused not to desire.

There is much that I cannot write down, that I refuse to commit to paper for fear of discovery or blackmail, and yet what would it matter? I have hid these papers well, and they know, now, if they are reading this, they know the truth of it all. Why bother. God, why bother with the whole matter in the first place? Why could things not simply have stayed the way they were?

Because then I would not have known it, not any of it, not the touch of him, the way he would curl solid, rough hands around the back of my neck, and press his lips to mine as though he might die without the touch of my mouth. Strange, to be wanted – needed – for something more than my mind, for something far more primitive and old, beautiful and strange. And so unlike what I had thought it might have been.

Love is, of course, impractical and foolish. That is its very nature. It can have no other nature. So there was something like relief in the realization that it was not love, not even like love. It was unpredictable, volatile, imperfect, even violent perhaps, and yet it was not foolish. We knew very well what it was we did. We were ruining ourselves, and each other. That was all right as far as myself was concerned – I had no self to ruin, really, although he did. And the guilt for ruining him – that guilt pursues me still.

Despite what I had read and half believed, in my more sentimental moments, of what it meant to be an Urning2, I now had to disagree. It was nothing even vaguely resembling love.

It was beautiful, though, the poetry of his face and body, the feel of the muscles beneath the skin, the heat of his blood. Truly beautiful.

1 By Holmes's time, ladies didn't, unless they were very, very elderly. Holmes is, as usual, slightly disconnected from the rest of the world.

2 Ulrichs's term for a homosexual man.


	19. A Fourth Explanation

This explanation and of course its corresponding chapter are dedicated to Nianeyna, for PMing me with encouragement and orders to update, thus motivating me to get off my tranny arse and write.

**--------**

**A Fourth Explanation**

_By Maxwell Gabriel Neiman_

It perhaps says something important regarding Dr. John Watson's identity that while recording his first intimate encounter with his friend was repugnant to him, he seems to have had no compunctions about documenting the second. From this point forward, the accounts of their associations which we have cobbled together alternate from both of their journals.

I present Dr. Watson's account of further events prohibited by the Offenses Against the Persons act.


	20. The First and Last

**Chapter Fifteen**

**The First and Last**

After that evening in the parlor, we never addressed his disease in such explicit terms.

Four days went by. To say "four days went by," does not fully, not even partly, characterize those four days. They were mad, unreal, full of imagined danger and suspicion from all quarters. I thought that anyone might find me out – cab drivers, flower girls, even Mrs. Hudson's vapid maid Edna. I did not live in the present, nor in anything that could possibly be construed as reality. Instead, I methodically seemed to be calling into question each one of my fine moral ideas, at which point some infernally logical and excessively modern demon in the corner of my mind would begin to remind me sensibly of the past.

_Public school…_I had thought those days had been stricken from the record of my memory, forgotten just as all of the other follies of youth had been. Now the memories returned tenfold and more, of being shoved into doorways and savaged as a new bug, then of doing so myself to other new boys as the years went on. Not strange, not unnatural, only the sort of childhood games and forgotten indecencies that the entire country communally agreed to forget. Those four days were like a magic lantern of the past and thousands of imagined futures, beautiful and horrid in their lucidity.

At this point –

_Editor's Note: The aforementioned ripped out and burned pages come here._

And there was nothing more.

And so it went, and so it was henceforth to go. Holmes would be as ascetic as possible for days on end, and when he did come close to me, it was quick and as without feeling as he could make it. I could not object to this. If it had to be done, and something in us both told us that it did, then best to be done without drawing it out, and not too often. We could not help it sometimes, though, and time would soften and elongate…Still, he was a mercurial man. Being near to me hurt him, just as it hurt me, but for him it was in a more grave, more frightening way. It caused him some inexplicable pain deep inside the recesses of him which I was never allowed to access. And yet, in some strange capacity born only of our long association, I understood it, the intangible stab of humiliating pain it caused him to reach out and admit he was in need, he was human, and he too possessed base desires.

None of these are memories I can properly transmit to paper – not the raw, almost animal smell of him, nor the taste of his mouth, tobacco smoke and salt, nor the iridescent sheen of sweat that dusted itself over both his skin and mine. It could have been awful, to seem him reduced so, and at times it was. Yet somehow, it was beautiful, to know him so deeply, to destroy all his mystery and have him laid vulnerable before me, at least sometimes. Like a revelation, thought after thought came crashing in, at once new and gleaming and unspeakably primitive and old. _I have wanted, _I found myself thinking, _I have wanted for so long to feel this, a communion of equals, a battle and a dialogue, I have wanted his mouth, his hands, to press – like that! Like that!_

It at once deepened and destroyed all of the mysteries he had once held. I had something above him now, a certain pride that I had caused him to reach that savage, forbidden zenith where he was stripped of all chance at any intellectual pretense.

There was one moment which I believe I shall forever recall. It was only the second time he ever offered me what could by some more psychological reckoning be construed as a kiss. Our flagrant violation of the British law was at its height. I could hardly breathe for the insane, consuming sensation which filled me and grabbed me by the throat, refusing to let me go. Without warming, he threw his head back as far as possible and pressed his half open mouth not to my own, but to the line of my jaw, my cheeks, with a furious, desperate need more like hunger than anything I had ever seen in Holmes. It was not loving or affectionate, not even gentle, but born out of that all too human need to connect which he could hardly admit he possessed.

I could not speak. I did not try. The only thing I could do was to turn weakly over and face him, to catch the edge and then the whole of his lips with my own. For what seemed a century to me, all cliché aside, a century, I refused to relinquish that communion. Perhaps something in me knew that it would not come again.

His hands, thin and exquisitely precise, slid up over the tight cords of my neck, around to its nape, where he laced them into my hair and brought our faces closer still. He would not let me go. He too knew, perhaps, that this communion would not take place again.

When finally it was broken, it was not I who pulled away. For all my qualms and fine English morals, it was he who pulled back and looked wonderingly at me, hands braced against my shoulders. A bead of sweat rolled delicately down his temple. He breathed something soft and sad in French, and the sheer sweet tragedy of the sound of his voice made me thank God that I had never learned the language.

Holmes curled himself inward, lying his head on my chest, still murmuring in the language of his grandmother. Slowly, tentatively, I placed one hand on his head, stroking his hair as though he were a small child. He leaned almost indulgently into my touch, like a cat, and I ran my hand back through his already thinning black hair. For all that, though, the thinning hair and the lines on his face, he seemed so young at times.

Then my other hand brushed against the strong, tensely knotted muscles of his solar plexus. Although they were beginning to relax just slightly, I could still feel his strength. He was not weak, he was not a child, and he was most importantly not a woman. I must not forget my sin, however tiresome the reminder of it may become to my reader. I assure you, it is far more painful and unpleasant for me.

He upturned his face to me and smiled ruefully, and I forgot his strength once more. Numbly, I bent to cover his mouth with mine, but he frowned and turned his face away.

Although sporadic relations between us continued -

_Editor's Note: Here there are the words, "He did not kiss me again," but they have been nearly obliterated from the page by crossings out and hatch marks._


	21. Virgin Morning

Please go back to A Fourth Explanation and reread it before continuing. It has been changed significantly.

**---------------**

**Chapter Seventeen**

**Virgin Morning**

The thing that always fascinated me about the mornings was what amalgamations of emotions they were. Truly an alienist's dream. There was such regret, and a vague sense of violation, and yet at once there was a deep, abiding comfort that hung in one's bones like the warmth of a wintertime fire.

It was not the first time, nor even the second or third. It was sin as routine, or even perhaps as comfort. And it functioned oddly well as such. Gray light came in the window, somehow twisting its way through all of the assurances towards secrecy with which I had blocked the window pane. The stretched, strained light touched my nightshirt almost tenderly, like a lover, tossed as it was on the floor, casually, almost savagely aside.

I was lying stiffly on my side, staring at the wallpaper and the maze of the patterns stamped upon it. It was very cold, even for April, the morning lying in the standing water of that awkward stage between adolescent, bitterly freezing night and adult, sun warmed day. Watson was stretched comfortably out on the opposite side of the bed. He never seemed to wake up cold as I did, with his sweat and his seed dry on my skin and my arms wrapped around me in a vain effort to conserve some of the previous night's heat.

As a child, they promised my mother I would not survive my first month on earth_. "He is too small to live."_ Secretly, my brother told me, he had always thought I was too sad to live, with my small pinched infant face and birdlike shoulder blades sticking out at unnatural angles. I was several weeks prematurely born. Perhaps this explains my perversion_. "You must keep him in warm weather, as warm as you can. He is a sickly boy. He will not be an athlete, I'm afraid."_ They used to talk about me as though I was a hothouse orchid. I believe I have reached six feet in height and whatever physical prowess I possess only through spite.

Uncomfortably hunched over, hands nervously twitching at the sheets, I wished for my nightshirt, but was too naked and cold to rise from the bed and retrieve it. Next to me, Watson shifted in his sleep, stifled by hushed dreams of secret things. Did he know how much of an enigma he could be to me? Now, does he realize it? Oh, I know everything about him. I know the way he stands and what it means about his state of mind. I can follow his thoughts like a tracker on the savannah, I know where he plans to spend his money and where he has been that day. And yet, with all this knowledge and deduction at which I am so skilled, I still know nothing of the silver landscapes of his dreams. What was he dreaming of that morning? Why do I remember it, and what compels me to set it down? These, though, are questions for another time.

Again he moved, creaking the already overtaxed mattress, and I felt the break in the dawn's grey flow that meant he had woken up. I shut my eyes. Perhaps I could feign sleep. He did not need to mock me with his own natural, calm humanity, not when my own was so difficult to grasp.

"Holmes?" He asked thickly, and I will admit to a flash of pride as I realized I was the first person he asked for upon waking. Unable to help it, I opened one eye and turned around to look at him.

"Mmm?" I was such an actor, pretending not to have been awake for hours, shivering and wishing I could have some of his warmth again.

"Oh. Well. Good morning," he said, sitting up. He held the sheets nervously to his chest, as though afraid for me to catch a glimpse of him.

"Mmm," I said again, and grabbed his wrist as tightly as I could. I was not ready to allow the night to pass. Not completely. Not yet.

He did not try to pull his wrist back, either. Oh, it was just as well for him. He could believe that it was mere medical curiosity or sheer wrongly placed compassion. He did not make a sound as I moved him closer to me. A silly charade, really, pretending it was I who tempted him. A very silly charade.

With the gray light still spilling in onto our poor forsaken nightshirts, we lay in what was to become our customary way, with my head just brushing the strong line of his jaw, cheek pressed comfortably against his collarbone. I hummed, only to fill the silent air, snatches of opera and Mendelssohn. One of his hands left the small of my back to cover my mouth. Outside of this room, this bed, he would never have dared even to question my odd whims, but here there were no barriers between us.

His hands traced my face in the silence. Protruding chin, enormous and almost Semitic nose, stubble dusting my throat, a mouth like the slash of a knife. I have always been remarkably ugly, but there is some magnetic force in ugliness.

We were waiting in the gray light for something, or nothing, to happen. It seemed as though we waited for a long time. Things became familiar, and the part of my mind that faintly recognized the bitter repugnancy of our actions was slowly silenced. I knew that the silence would not last, but it was good to have it for just a while. It was good to have those silent mornings. I molded with my hands the muscles of his back, feeling them loosen under my touch.

He was exposed but not afraid. I was afraid but not exposed. All of my emptiness had been filled. I was not fool enough to believe that any of it might last, and yet somehow it did. The gray virgin morning stretched on and on, full of his rough hands and his soft voice and his mouth on the back of my neck.


	22. A Day in the Sun for Doctor Faustus

**Chapter Eighteen**

**A Day in the Sun for Doctor Faustus**

London. The thirtieth of June, 1883.

Holmes had been out all day, much to my consternation, in one of his periodic states of utterly incongruous cheerfulness. These moods tended to make him a magnetic figure, not only to myself but to the general population. It always amused me to observe the way women would look at him as we walked down the street together, he humming some concerto or other, his hair fluttering in the wind, his expression a rapt, abstracted smile.

This evening, he returned from where ever he had been with an enormous grin on his face, and as he rushed up the steps to the parlor, I could hear him whistling snatches of Chopin.

"Watson!" he greeted me, nodding to where I sat on the sofa, "Good evening, my dear fellow." Holmes glanced derisively at the sea novel I was perusing. "Oh, dear me. Your reading material seems to have degenerated of late. Yesterday it was Marlowe and now it is back to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever shall become of my chronicler's literary taste? The poetic and dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, while paltry compared to Shakespeare or Milton, should not be denied their few days in the sun."

"I am once again obligated to demand how on earth you know -"

"Don't bother," he chuckled self deprecatingly. "For once, it is nothing remarkable. Only that I observed this morning that Christopher Marlowe was lying on your bedside table. Now, before you are filled with undue excitement, I must warn you, it was the writing and not the actual man himself. The Damnation of Doctor Faustus, to be precise." Holmes collapsed onto the couch beside me, looking at me intently. "Why that particular play?"

"Why not?" I avoided his eyes.

"I didn't ask that, did I?" He placed one hand on my shoulder, forcing me to face him. "I asked _why._ There are certainly plenty of reasons why _not._"

"Please, quote some of them."

"Well," he began, jabbing my chest uncharacteristically playfully with one long index finger, "to begin with it is depressing. It is tragedy, for pity's sake, Watson. Elizabethan tragedy. The only thing more depressing than that is Greek tragedy, and that generally involves incest,1 so unless you are feeling intensely compelled to rediscover your relatives in Scotland in a manner carnal, I would highly recommend staying away from Sophocles and his ilk."

"You once again demonstrate your enormous talent for saying both everything and nothing at the same time."

"So do you. I ask again: Why that play?"

Bantering with Holmes is always a losing battle. I threw up my hands in a gesture of surrender. "Touché. I will tell you, but only because of your unfailing politeness."

"Your kind words do me great credit," Holmes drawled, "they really do."

"I should hope so. But in any case…" I sighed. "You _will_ say that I am only being foolish."

"Certainly not!" Holmes sniffed mockingly, then relented. "All right, possibly. But you _will_ tell me."

"Well. Of late, considering…events of late…I have been interested in…deeper issues of…human morality –"

"Really? Again?"

"Yes, again, and - and – Holmes, will you please refrain from that sort of amusement when I am trying to discuss issues of deeper human morality?"

Holmes removed his hand from mine with a gesture of shamefaced apology. "Carry on. You were saying? Deeper issues of human morality?"

"Yes," I confirmed, less sure than I sounded. I had not meant to have this conversation with him, and if ever, certainly not now, not when we had both grown so used to reality that we could almost pull the wool over our eyes. "Marlowe explores these."

"That he does." Holmes cocked his head, birdlike, and gave an oddly blithe smile. I was beginning to lose my resolve to concentrate upon deeper issues of human morality, and it was entirely Holmes's fault. "Now, doctor, what is it you were saying?"

"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, talking of doctors, makes a bargain."

"Yes." Holmes stretched out his legs. I was beginning to regret my personal Faustian bargain both more and less all at once. Holmes has that sort of puzzling effect upon me. "He does indeed. His soul, in exchange for extraordinary ability. And pleasure."

"Precisely."

The gray eyes were suddenly considering, weighing pros and cons in the frighteningly logical way unique to Holmes. "So. You believe you have made a Faustian bargain."

"I am considering that perhaps I have, of sorts." It seemed near to a confession, somewhat whimsical, to tell him of this odd delusion I had so long been nursing. Only now, as I write this, now that he is dead and I will never bring all my regret to any sort of coherent achievement, does it come to me how much my words must have pained him. I never saw his heart, for he never allowed me to, so how was I to know if I had caused him pain?

"And perhaps you have made a Faustian bargain, Watson. But then, if you have done, then I have done likewise, haven't I? Don't think it has not crossed my mind as well, doctor." Holmes had one hand resting on his chin, and now he opened it to gesture with the unnatural grace his hands have always held. "We are both damned together."

"Oh. Well, then. We shall have to find a way to tolerate each other's company, shan't we?"

But he did not spring to the bait for more lighthearted banter. "The question is not so much whether or not we have sold our souls to the devil, as that will be a moot point until the both of us are dead, but whether or not the devil has adhered to his side of the bargain, and if so, has he done it properly?" Holmes leaned his head back against the couch's backboard, staring contemplatively up at the ceiling.

In the silence, I breathed in his smell, and I moved closer and closer still. I looked at him, at the unreal asymmetry of that angular, unhandsome, almost ugly face. He smelled of tobacco and the ashy, gaslight scent of London.

Feeling my eyes on him, he turned his head one miniscule amount and skewered me with his gaze. His eyes were the sharp, painful color of rainstorms in winter. "Really, my dear boy, I would not worry if I were you. The question is, for now, if you have found the devil's remuneration congenial. And have you? Doctor?"

"Yes." Yes, I had. I was close enough now to almost whisper the word into his black hair. Perhaps if I pressed close enough to him, no one would have to hear me, and no one else would ever know. "Yes. Yes. I have."

"I am gratified to hear it," Holmes breathed.

There was nothing to say. We always seemed to reach this juncture. We both knew what path we were on. That has been clear to the both of us for quite some time. But, as I often remark to Holmes while bothering him about his health, one cannot help one's training, and awkwardness is a constant threat. It is in these moments that the strangeness of it all occurs to me. So foreign, to feel strong, callused hands in my own, on my face. So different, to press against someone who refused to yield. The female has kept none of her secrets from me. Holmes has kept them all.

Mrs. Hudson, possessing as she is of all the excellent timing in the world, chose this moment to knock on the door. Holmes rose, letting out a curse that it would only tarnish his memory to record here, although it is no doubt tarnished enough, and I jumped up. Holmes grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me down again, jammed my book into my hands, pressed his lips to my cheek with a shocking ferocity, then straightened up once more, leaned coolly against the couch, and called out, "Mrs. Hudson! Come in please!"

His energy certainly seemed to have returned to him. "You know," he muttered to me out of the side of his mouth, "I really think you needn't worry. The devil, being a first cousin of Narcissus, is far too caught up in his own affairs to concern himself with upstanding Englishmen such as yourself, Watson."

No doubt he was correct.

_Later the same evening._

Holmes stood before the mirror in his bedroom, wrestling unsuccessfully with his cravat knot, and I sat contentedly on the bed, shedding my jacket and shirt collar.

"This cravat," complained Holmes murderously, "is going to be the death of me."

"What? I never thought you concerned yourself with matters of fashion, Holmes." I slipped off both my shoes and sat awkwardly on the bed, staring at the walls, adorned as they were with photographs of famous (or rather, infamous) criminals.

"It is not the look of it. It is the fact that it refuses to come undone." For a while, he suffered in silence before the bedroom mirror, then finally turned to me, hands turned up in a gesture of surrender. "I throw myself entirely upon the tender mercies of whatever gods govern troublesome cravat knots."

"Hmm. I would put on a nightshirt, but…"

Did I detect the workings of his impish sense of humor? "No, you're right. Counterproductive, in any case."

For a long moment, I closed my eyes. I thought of Mary, and of Holmes, and of Narcissus, and his first cousin, the Devil, and I thought of myself, and where I stood.

When I opened my eyes, it was to his head on my shoulder, his thin arms loosely around me. He has never reached out to touch me. When he does make contact, it is as though he is falling, unable to help himself despite great restraint. It is always disquieting to look down at him even from a vantage point of a few inches. He is inherently so strong, so volatile, that it is like having a tiger that thinks it is a housecat.

I was paralyzed, and the rigidity of my shoulders must have shown it, for Holmes looked up at me with a lopsided smile and a vague, dazed look in his eyes. "Really," he said in his most carefully precise tones, "you cannot be afraid of me, of all people." He paused. "Are you?"

He thinks a lot of himself, Holmes does, and I likewise both admire him and feel an amount of deference towards him. And yet. Standing there with his troublesome cravat nearly coming undone, he did not frighten me at all. Not one whit.

"Holmes," I pointed out, "you make a very bedraggled Mephistopheles." After several minutes profitable amusement I asked, "Do you suppose I can risk sleeping the night here?"

"Let us not go meandering, Mr. Copperfield. Whoever mentioned anything about sleeping?"

His teeth gently grazed the nape of my neck. "It's a mad world. Mad as Bedlam, boy!"

I smiled, but from his position behind me, he could not see it. "You'll find us rough sir, but you'll find us ready."2

1 Holmes is exaggerating. The only noticeable examples of incest in Greek tragedy come in Elektra and in the Oedipus Cycle. Since the only Greek playwright Holmes names is Sophocles, who wrote both of the aforementioned plays, we are forced to wonder just how extensive his knowledge of the subject may be. (After all, as Watson wrote in A Study in Scarlet, "Knowledge of Literature: Nil.")

2 All three of these – "let us have no meandering," "it's a mad world" and "you'll find us rough, sir," are quotes from Dickens's David Copperfield.


	23. Fragments

I am sorry for not updating. Bad author, very bad. I've been focusing far more on my original work lately, which can be found at under the name Childe Harold. Also, I'm trying my hand at _Catcher in the Rye _slash due to the horrible corrupting influence of a certain person whose name begins with a B and ends with an R and has an AXTE in the middle.

**-----------**

**Chapter Nineteen**

**Fragments**

Now, looking back in my quiet retrospective stasis of half recognized grief, the months following do not return as whole and complete events. Rather, what I can force myself to recall I recall only in somewhat abstracted splinters, as though my memory were a wineglass knocked carelessly from an unsuspecting hand, scattering the white tablecloth with shards of crystal and splattered redness. I should hope that someday my memories will collect themselves naturally, composing themselves like a frightened fishwife after a break in, but now perhaps these vivid shards are just as valuable. They are like injections aimed straight at the core of a man, sharp and hard and unrevised.

I recall, of course, those first few fervent months, when neither of us could even begin to admit what we had done or were doing even while engaged in the act itself. But enough has been told of them, and in all honesty, what I have not recalled here, no man shall ever read.

I am sure I shall forget even those searing moments, given time. They will fall away from me, naturally, like dying leaves in autumn, or the white hair of a centenarian…

"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked me, quietly, bluntly, brushing an imaginary speck of dust off of his moustache. Watson had a longtime athlete's ease in nakedness, one which I could never have possessed, bony bag of countless neuroses that I was. Some of the tan of his years in Afghanistan still clung to his skin, drawing a beautiful contrast to the plain white linen of our musky smelling bed sheets. Trust him to know that I would wake with my mouth dry. It was eerie, feeling so transparent…

"Do the lilies always bloom so late?" he inquired as we stood outside a graveyard, just leaving the funeral services for yet another lost client, the both of us in black. I spun a lily from the service in my hand. Flowers of death, what silly symbolism. He looked melancholy, although we had not known the man in question for more than an hour. Failure was sunk deep in my stomach, and I could not be sure who felt it more. Perhaps for his comfort, perhaps for my own, I reached one hand into his coat pocket as though I might hold it, but he took it away and spoke of botany and justice…

"Will you hold this please?" he requested, pushing a sheaf of paper at me. "Even if you do think my writing lays it on a bit thick..."

…I swallowed, surprised when the simple action hurt my throat. "I do not know. I had never considered the lilies before…"

Stupid, insignificant, small things like the ghost presence of someone else in my actions and thoughts still recall him. I remember the words of silly songs from comic operas which he knew by heart. I remember the late evenings with nothing but my weary limbs and the endless, bottomless pit of his sympathy.

One would think that things might change with time and one would be correct – they did, but only slightly, only by the most minute of degrees. Eventually, we began to accept the awfulness of our fate, which seemed to be to need each other in a manner we did not even understand. The jokes we made were gallows humor, but they reaffirmed the reality of our bizarre bond, and I appreciated them. They kept my guilt and fear from turning into an inward bleeding.

If perhaps I woke in the night afraid, and he comforted me, what of it? If I am a child, who knows but him? And he will never tell. If my quiet, black and white world of the mind was briefly shattered for the sake of a few brief nights with him, who will ever know or care? If we lived in an ideal world, even I could forget, and so be absolved of it all.

Absolution will take time, and if I were a man of faith, it would take prayer.

"Church again?" I asked, hanging my hat on the peg.

"Yes, church again," he said, harried and nervous, scuffing his shoes on the mat and dashing upstairs before I could reach out to him.

It was 1884, Mrs. Hudson was calling from outside, and I was lying sprawled across his chest. It was 1890, and his hand was shivering quietly in my own. It was 1872, and I was shaking with fear and a copy of Plato's _Symposium_ in my university dormitory's bed. It was 1883, and he was holding a pamphlet and staring at me as though I had gone mad…It was 1886, and he was asking me to consider the lilies, and then he was leaving me. It was May and Mary looked lovely in her wedding dress. It was December of a year that I could not recall, and my bare shoulders were shaking in the gray cold, and he was offering me a glass of water.

It was 1886 and he had just returned from some delving into the remarkable case of the Sign of the Four.

"I say, Watson, you look regularly done. Lie down here on the sofa and I'll see if I can't relax you."

He gave me a suspicious glance, and I stared baldly back. Oh, the things I could have said. _I am not jealous. What cause have I for jealousy? It is the province of women, is it not? What would I want with you, after all? She is only a girl._

He lay there, and I knew that his every thought was for her. Of course they were. Why should they not be? I knew then that I had lost him. He was gone, swept away with the lady and the treasure and the Oriental glory of it all. Perhaps others would think him mercenary, that he sought Miss Morstan's wealth and not her person. This was never true. I know my Watson. _If he ever marries_, I thought, _and now he will marry - of this I have no doubt – then it will be for love_. He is too honest to do otherwise. Far too honest.

Of course he thought of her. Perfect flowering specimen of English womanhood, she was soft, sketched in all pinks and whites. She was not beautiful. I have seen beauty, seen it in the persons of famous opera divas and actresses. I saw Berndhardt's Camille once. She was, of course, sublime. That is beauty. Miss Mary Morstan is simple, sure, natural. A simple lady for a simpleton.

And yet he was not, really. Certainly, if he was simple, than I was twice the fool, for I have allowed him access to such secret parts of me as I have never allowed another. He took me. He stole from me things I was not even aware that I possessed, and it is not the sort of theft that one can punish and undo. All of me seems barren now.

What a damnable thing it is, to lose one's only friend.

Or rather, to let him go. For such was I doing, playing his favorite airs while he slept and dreamt of Miss Mary Morstan. I was more than letting him go, I was practically shoving him out the door. I was fiddling while Baker Street burned.

Ah well. At least I could look at him now, while I played. He looked innocent as he slept, but then, so do we all. Perhaps before he woke I brushed his cheek with my fingertips. Perhaps that touch would tide me over, silent and unaware, and I would live to see another sunrise.


	24. A Time to Refrain from Embracing

**Chapter Twenty**

**A Time to Refrain from Embracing**

London. The twenty-seventh of October, 1887.

I was woken early by a pounding on my door. "Yes?" I groggily replied, and sat up, emerging with a jolt from a disquieting dream.

"Doctor Watson!" It was Mrs. Hudson, resplendent in bright blue, complete with a tray of breakfast. "Good morning! I am sorry to wake you so early, sir, but I thought it best, really, and…" She trailed off, staring abstractly at the bedpost. "And I should think that after living the years I've lived I should know a thing or two regarding marriage!" The lady finished triumphantly, setting the tray down on the bedside table.

"Good morning, Mrs. Hudson…" I managed sleepily, then took in the welcome sight of the tray heaped with one of our landlady's sublime breakfasts. "Good heavens. You really oughtn't to pamper me, Mrs. Hudson. I am quite capable of getting up and eating breakfast on my own."

"I am sure you're quite capable of murder as well, dear, but I don't see you going out and doing it." Mrs. Hudson has something of an acerbic humorist lurking deep within her, and it bursts out when she believes Holmes or myself is not being sensible. She handed me a fork and seemed to be about to watch me eat, a prospect I found slightly disconcerting, but for a bitingly ironic voice issuing from the doorway.

"For pity's sake, my dear lady, it's hardly feeding time at the zoological gardens. Let the man eat." A dressing gowned Sherlock Holmes leaned against the doorframe, amused disdain radiating off of his person in veritable waves. "Watson's a bridegroom, not a chimpanzee. Although they are essentially the same thing."

"Shall I throw a dish towel at him for you, sir?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Hudson, I believe I can keep the best man under control on my own."

"And thank heaven for that," Holmes drawled, putting his thin hands behind his head and leaning back. "Whatever would we do otherwise? There is always the option of annulment, you know. Besides, it is not to late to break off engagement now."

It was a cruel dig to make.

I repaid what I knew to be a very real anger with a very false flippancy. "On second thought, Mrs. Hudson, you are absolutely welcome to throw the dish towel at him."

"Thank you, sir." She did, too, tossing it snappily at him as she went out.

Holmes caught the towel, and regarded it sardonically before setting it down on the foot of the bed, then sitting down himself, his back to me. I watched the back of his neck, the way the vertebrae defined themselves when his head slumped on his shoulders, as it was doing now. "You don't suppose I might be at all successful in my constant entreaties for your reconsideration?" He asked, drumming white fingers on the bedpost.

"No," I answered honestly. "No."

He turned one eye towards me, glaring at me over his left shoulder. I noticed the way his hair twitched as he turned his head. Every day, I seemed to see him in sharper detail, and every day, I seemed to recall just how much I would need the memories. I did not expect to see much of him after my marriage. Holmes was angry with me, and I could only see that anger growing in the following months. Perhaps it would be for the best. But the idea was not likely. I would miss him very much.

"So. You fell in love." His mouth formed a twisted parody of a smile. His lips were dry, and I could see them crack. "Congratulations. I have never been able to do so. At least there is one thing you have the upper hand in." It was a nasty remark, cruel and unlike him. He was not himself this morning. But then, how could he be expected to be. Or is it conceited of me to think that way?

"Perhaps, if you had been able to fall in love, you would not be quite so unhappy."

"Yes, it is supposed to make one happy, isn't it?" Holmes turned to face me, sitting cross legged on the bedclothes. He was barefoot, and I was suddenly, insanely, struck by the delicacy of his anklebones. Plainly I was not myself either. Everything seemed very clear, and very obvious, and very still.

"It does make one happy, Holmes."

"Then why are you so miserable?"

"I'm not –"

"You have not begun eating breakfast, which under normal circumstances you certainly would, and in fact you have been toying with that fork for almost four minutes without making the slightest motion towards the tray our estimable landlady has so generously prepared for you. Also, you have not said good morning, and you are looking at me as though I am Beezlebub come for your soul."

"Well, good morning," said I, with an attempt at a smile that dropped indecorously off my face and slithered under the bedclothes to die a lonely death. "I don't think it is Beezlebub who comes for souls."

"Knowledge of literature: Nil," Holmes quoted with a black cheeriness. "I assume that means religious literature as well, dear boy. Although it's nothing to your lack of basic Biblical knowledge."

"What?"

"Leviticus."1

"I'm afraid I remain in a fog as to your meaning, Holmes."

"'If a man lieth with another man as he lieth…'"

I threw the fork down in disgust and simply glared at him. "Holmes, I will not be having this. It is my wedding morning."

Holmes plucked at a loose strand of the comforter. "Is it really? I had no idea."

I could only look at him, betrayed and angry. "I thought we had agreed."

"Isn't that an odd coincidence, doctor? So did I."

"Holmes, don't bother." I moved to get up from bed, but he stopped me by laughing belligerently.

"Oh, Watson, Watson, don't bestir yourself on my account!" Smiling furiously, he rose from the bed, brushing my leg in the process with one hand. He saw my automatic intake of breath, somewhere half between fear and anticipation, and his smile became even more cynical. "My effect upon you ought not to be so great, really, doctor. I hope you shall learn to mitigate it around your _wife_." He said the word as though it was obscene. I have heard him speak of murder, forgery, rape, thievery, and any number of hideous practices, but for marriage, particularly my marriage, he reserved a special brand of venom. "Well," he concluded, "Good morning. I hope you enjoy your breakfast." But despite his words, he stood there like a man paralyzed, staring at the air just above my left shoulder.

His eyes moved to my face. They are gray, and they are positively maddening in their lack of expression when he wishes it.

"Get out." said I, my hands beginning to shake. "Get out." I am not a man possessed of any remarkable temper, but neither of us could deny the facts. It was my wedding morning. Old habits are said to be difficult to break, and Holmes has always been a creature of habit. Shag tobacco, cocaine, agony columns, violin playing, chemistry experiments, and, of course, myself, but I was one habit of which he would have to break himself. If he did not, then how would I break _myself_ of my unhealthy addiction to his presence? I pressed my hands to each other to stop their shaking, and did my best to look him in the eyes. "Holmes, time passes. And if you were well up on your Bible, you would know that. 'To every thing there is a season.'"

"Ecclesiastes," he said softly. "'A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.'"

"That doesn't come until much later. Besides, it's the cryptic, symbolic bit."

"What other bits matter? Trifles, Watson…" Holmes sighed, then skewered me again with on his eyes, like steel or English fog. "'A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.' That comes next, but I'm afraid it's a tad too literal for my taste." He absently scratched the graceful curve where his neck met his shoulder, and I turned my eyes away. "Do you regret it?" He asked, in the unimpassioned voice of the man doomed to hang.

"Regret what?"

"You are not a complete idiot, and you will not pretend to be for my sake."

I spread my hands in a gesture of uncertainty. "Ah. You're only young once…?"

For a moment he looked at me as though he might break out into a furious rant regarding my foolish flippancy, but then did what I hoped he would, and laughed long and loud. After a moment I joined him, and for a moment we both remembered the days before I had even thought of marriage, when we were simply two bachelors living together and sharing some of the most peculiar events in London. Like two schoolboys, best friends doing things in the dark. The days of, "Bring your revolver," and attacks of ennui followed by periods of insane energy, when the game was afoot and we were very young.

"I love Mary," I said abruptly.

Holmes stared at me like a deer threatened by a hunter, the tendons in his neck tightening. They only do so when he is shocked or afraid, aligning themselves into the intricate patterns only visible in men of extreme leanness. "Oh, do you? I don't recall you ever mentioning that," he said sarcastically, plucking the dish towel off of the bedpost and toying with it.

I had said of her what I had never said of him. There is much talk of "the love that dare not speak its name," among the aesthetes and among the artists and otherwise eloquently inclined inverts. I have never termed it that. I have never termed it love of any sort, because I tell you it is not that. It is shame, and the barriers between ourselves and the world that drive us to each other, shame because of loneliness, and loneliness because of shame. Before Afghanistan, when I was young, whole, hale and hearty, my mind had never run along those lines. And then after, after the fire and brimstone and misery that is war, I came home.

Like a lost dog, I had been limping aimlessly, when I was suddenly found and swept into a bizarre universe where the stuff of mystery novels was the stuff of everyday life, where there were criminals in the parlor and violinists in the bedroom, and of course irate police inspectors pounding on the door. His insane profession had given me purpose. Writing his exploits down and protecting him from his own insane habits had given my broken existence some reviving quality that allowed me to once more call it life. And I like to think, I enjoy imagining, that my solid simplicity and general practicality gave Holmes a steady thing to put his back against. It was only natural that we should gravitate to each other in ways we could never have conceived of – in ways, indeed, that we still could not conceive of even as the fateful events transpired.

But not love. Not love, only the need to have another human being with one. Not love. _Communion._

"'All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again,'" Holmes quoted quietly, jerking me out of my contemplation. "Ecclesiastes 3:20. It puts things into perspective very well." He sighed again, a long shuddering breath of resignation and misery. "I am glad it is Miss Morstan. At least she is pleasant. And I suppose it must happen at some time. Why not now? And why not her? I can think of no reasons against it." He slipped his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and regarded me with the sort of piercing gaze I have only observed in him when he is trying very hard to imprint something in his memory. "This, I think, is how I will remember your time here in Baker Street," he remarked sadly, proving once more how well I knew him. "With you looking charmingly caught out of your depth, puzzled and tragic and doomed to the benighted institution that is British marriage." Suddenly, he grinned, an expression of desperately artificial happiness. "Congratulations, Watson. Best wishes for your life together. And your good diamond tie pin, which you no doubt will be searching frantically for it in a moment, is lying peacefully underneath your latest sensationalist manuscript, quite undeserving of the curses you would soon be hurling at it had I not told you where it was." I had not realized that he had been moving towards me during this speech, but now I could feel his closeness, like sitting too nearby a fire.

Holmes reached out and touched my hand. His own was freezing and had some of ice's translucent coloring, and the veins stood out as though it was a railroad map. "Good morning," he said gently, pressed my warm hand in his two cold ones, and left the room. The door had never fitted its frame quite properly, and now the scrape it made across the carpet sounded like a whisper, like the sounds we make at night when we dream of ourselves as they ought be, and would be, were it not for what we think we truly are.

1 In Leviticus is the infamous, "he who lieth with a man as he lieth with a woman…" verse.


	25. Photographs of Children

**Chapter Twenty-One**

**Photographs of Children**

To: Dr. John Watson

From: Mr. Mycroft Holmes

Regarding: My late brother

Come by the Diogenes Club at eleven tomorrow STOP Could provide you with some comfort at your loss STOP Greatest condolences STOP M.H. STOP

What first struck me about the telegram, aside from Mycroft's surprisingly sympathetic attitude, most uncharacteristic of him, was the fact that he referred to his brother's death as _my _loss, not his. Mycroft had been his brother, still was his brother, I supposed, whereas I had only been his friend and flatmate. However, I felt I could not deny the undeniable. It was the brother of my greatest friend, and I had an obligation towards the family, much as I would like to ignore it and forget that fateful day at St. Bart's when I met the man who would take my life and play with it as he wished, before he disappeared, destroyed in roiling water and crushing rocks.

Mycroft Holmes, graciously leading me into the visitor's room of the Diogenes Club, had not changed since I had last seen him. The lines of grief had not even made their presence known in his fleshy face. I felt a surge of resentment surge through me at this, at the fact that he could lose such a remarkably brother and yet not be at all affected. He was, of course, a member of that most remarkable lineage, the Holmes family, but now I began to think of what kind of man Mycroft Holmes could be, that the death of his brother could cause no disruption in his placid lake of a mind. I felt changed. I felt as though it was I who had fallen into the falls of Reichenbach, and a shadow of me had return. Only a shell. Almost nothing at all.

"Doctor Watson. A pleasure. How do you do?" Mycroft lit a cigar and offered his hand to shake. I did so, smiling as best I could, but the grin felt like a sunburn on my face, stretched and insincere and painful.

"You do not seem to have changed at all," I remarked as cheerily as I could under the circumstances. I am afraid it is possible that my bitterness at Mycroft's calm burst into my words, and he, intuitive as he had ever been, twitched one eyebrow so that it arched the way his brother's once had. Holmes's face had had a grace that his brother's simply did not possess, with all its flesh and encumbering fat.

"You have not changed noticeably either," Mycroft replied, and I almost felt as though I was a chastised child, back again to the days when I was only a boy being scolded for being disrespectful to my betters. Holmes had once reminded me of a child. _Children should be seen and not heard._

I was silent.

For a time then, we talked about the shockingly inconsequential things of everyday life. The two of us in our armchairs, in our mourning black, made a peculiar duo, especially since the elder man persistently bit his lip as though to bite back words, as though he had something he wished to tell me but could not. Remorse seemed to haunt him, only a heartbeat away, but never allowing any more than that to show in his face. It at once made me empathize with him and scorn him, for failing to be able to mourn his brother they way he ought to.

Eventually, Mycroft came to the point for which he had brought me there. It was an enormous, loosely bound leather book.

"As a child," the corpulent elder Holmes brother – now the only Holmes brother - explained to me, "I had something of an interest in amateur photography, being as I was – as we both were – not of a social persuasion, I rather enjoyed a discipline in which I could simply hide in an unlit room. Once or twice, Sherlock attempted to assist me with the developing process, but while he had a genius for chemicals, he was extremely uncoordinated. Yes, yes, when he was young, he was indeed," Mycroft added, seeing my surprised face. Holmes had always been, while he was alive, the most physically fit man I ever knew. _While he was alive._

He hoisted the huge book onto the table, where he opened it to the first page. Photographs had been pasted carefully there by a painstaking hand – Mycroft Holmes's, no doubt – and the first was of a boy. A teenaged creature, by the looks of him. He was arrogantly glorious, really, his long legs crossed with one ankle at the opposite knee, and one sinewy arm extended proudly, with a graceful curve to it that echoed the asymmetrical slant of his jaw. His dark haired head was held high, somewhere between hubris and boyish joy at being young, and strong, and alive.

Tentatively, I reached out to turn the page. Mycroft sat back, allowing me to peruse it at my leisure. Why did he wish me to see this? Why did he believe it might alleviate my grief somewhat? There was no conceivable reason I could think of, really. It was only a boy – indeed, only a photograph of a boy, and not a boy I knew.

Then, however, I turned the page. It was the same boy. His face had a look of mildly condescending amusement that was enormously charming. "Do not worry," he seemed to say, "trust me. I know what I am about. I always have know, you see. Trust me, will you, you silly creature?" I had seen that face before, more times than I could count, when Holmes had declared his intentions to pursue an idea that sounded particularly mad, yet one that he had perfect faith in. Generally, to be fair, the idea was quite correct, and therefore over the years I had learned not to question him but to go along with whatever madness he happened to have in mind.

"It is…your late brother?" The question went dry as dust in my throat.

"Yes," Mycroft replied casually. "It is Sherlock."

I still would not call him that. However, it was indeed Sherlock Holmes, young and gawky and somewhat quietly amusing even as his image made me want to weep.

"He was terribly talented with fencing and boxing, even at that age," Mycroft remarked. "My father had him begin to study those disciplines, because he was so gawky and awkward that he could not even climb a tree without utter physical disaster striking from the heavens – I do mean it, doctor, as an adolescent he was like a whirling dervish or one of God's plagues upon the Egyptians - and our mother simply thought it was the best joke since Napoleon's great victory at Waterloo. Everyone was shocked that he was any good, especially as he was so very technically unaccomplished." Mycroft laughed. "He also wanted to be an actor, once. The difficulty was that he was a scorchingly honest personification of the savage world, and that has never really had any place in the theatre. He could have been a great actor, perhaps even one of the greatest of our time, but then, as you have said yourself, doctor, in your excellent chronicles, what the law has gained the stage has indeed lost." He paused, fiddling ineffectually with his gilded pocket watch. "Lost forever, now." Mycroft snapped the cover of the watch shut, the small sound making me jump at its very abruptness. As though he was snapping the lid of his brother's coffin finally shut.

I turned more pages. There was photograph after photograph of my friend in his youth. A few in particular struck me. In one, he sat in an apple tree, biting into one of the fruits. They looked ripe and good, and the juice was, unbeknownst to him, running down his sharp chin. His skinny legs dangled from the tree like a pair of sticks. The photograph ought to look charming and childish, and no doubt had been intended to be so, but he was looking archly at the photographer with a somewhat aggravated expression, as much as to say, "Can we get on with this ridiculous sentimentality?"

He had really been only skin and bone. I remember that when the wind blew his shirt against him, I could see each vertebrae in his spine. Thoracic, lumbar, and cervical vertebrae, I remembered their names from medical school, and I would name them each as I brushed my fingers over them in bed at night.

"I did not arrange the subjects," said Mycroft. "They are in their essence a series of grand accidents. Their engagingness owes much to my brother."

A very grand accident, in my opinion, and I said as much to Mycroft Holmes, who smiled tolerantly. "Thank you. I agree that it is an excellent photograph, but that is not so much my influence as the engaging quality of the subject matter." He was right, as well, for it almost seemed then that the photographs in that book were the closest embodiment of all the good principles of youth that I had ever seen. Perhaps the impression was made all the more deep and lasting by the fact that he had always been the most vigorously adult man I had known. To see him in the few years he had ever allowed himself to spend as a young man was like seeing Judas and Jesus in quiet, friendly conversation before the Judas kiss and the passion of the Christ.

And I had never been able to see him in that kind of light, in that youthful perfect innocence, but only the broken shell of it…still, I told myself. It was enough. It had to have been enough. Because I will never receive more.

I made as if to close the book, but my late friend's brother stayed my hand. "There is more," he said quietly. With a grave expression of confession on his face, as though he might admit to me some great and horrible secret, he pulled the book onto his ample lap and opened it to a place near the middle. From there, he gestured at one photograph in particular. It was of a man who was nearly as large and imposing a presence as Mycroft Holmes himself – indeed, he was more so. Mycroft wore his enormity with a degree of shame, but this man in the photograph stood tall and viewed the world with a bored, gloomy sneer. Plainly, here was a man who thought highly of absolutely nothing at all, save for his own rigid principles. He faced the lens of the camera with a disparaging attitude, as though despite knowing nothing of its workings, he might do better with it than the current photographer.

"That," Mycroft explained in a low voice that suddenly possessed a guilty tone I had not heard from him, "is my father, Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, or, as we affectionately called him," he added with irony, "Sir. And this," he turned the page to reveal another photograph, "is Sherlock's progenitor." The first thing I noticed about the photograph of the man who was Sherlock Holmes's father was the vibrantly green carnation issuing from his buttonhole. 

It was a photograph of Siger St. James. Plainly, Mycroft had not taken it, but instead it had been purchased at some cheap shop wherein one could buy photographs of the famous and the infamous, the adored and the reviled, the beautiful and the handsome and the hideous. And, in the case of Siger St. James, those who are all of these. How can I tell you of Siger St. James? I judge I do not need to. Wilder than Oscar, madder than a hatter, Siger St. James had become known in London's upper class for his pure audaciousness. At the young age of seventeen, he had sprung onto the scene through a scandalous love affair with one of London's most revered and loveliest debutante virgins, who worshiped him implicitly and without question, and he appeared to do the same for her – until of course, their wedding day, when he spectacularly left her at the altar, but not before declaring to all the newspapers and to the people in general both that he was madly in love and nesting with a singer and actress whose name he refused to divulge, and that one of London's most revered and loveliest debutante virgins might still be a debutante, but she was not a virgin. Womanizer, sodomite, and general genius of publicity and self exhibition, some said he was the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray.1 Others maintained that he was Lord Byron's return to England from beyond his Grecian grave. Siger St. James was a miracle and a monster, a legend in his own time and a beautiful anathema to the tender emotions of men and women alike.

In this particular photograph he leaned rakishly on a lamp post, staring at the viewer – at me! – as though he knew my every secret, my every desire that I did not dare voice. Siger St. James knew who I loved, and who I did not. He knew what it really meant when I refused to come to bed with Mary until the very last second. He knew every nuance of me, even more of me than his son ever had. His hat hung rakishly at the back of his head and his green carnation glared out of the picture like a winking emerald eye. A handsome man, of course by all reckonings, with some of his son's angular features and emaciated physique. His nose, unlike my friends, though, was curled charmingly up at its end, giving him something of the look of Mr. Barrie's Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.

Siger St. James was my late friend's father? It seemed at once impossible and perfectly sensible. Siger St. James. Infamous invert and eccentric, would indeed give birth to such an insanely repressed, closed man. Opposites do indeed breed each other, and Siger St. James and his remarkable son were no real exception. And yet –

"My mother was something of an unofficial kept woman. A courtesan, you know, like Fiornette or Harlotta or Vittoria in the Italian comedy2," Mycroft explained with unabashed frankness. "She had affairs, and copious ones. However, Sherlock was, I believe, the first affair from which any offspring issued. My father knew, but would not say. I knew, of course, and would. I told him, too. I thought he had a right to know, and I knew he was intelligent enough that otherwise he would only figure it out on his own. And then he would not have known I knew, and he would only have been even more miserable." Mycroft sighed. "It is of course too late to have regrets, and yet I must excuse the fact that I informed him. There was nothing else I could do. It was a cycle of savagery that my mother began when she married my father. She ought not to have. She could not have loved him less, you see. Towards the beginning, I believe she may have, just a bit, in the way people convince themselves to love people when they believe they should. It is a necessary, and indeed enormous part of the fine institution of English marriage." One of my friend's own eyes, the sole inheritance the brothers shared, winked out of Mycroft's face and skewered me on its stare. "The fine, _fine_ institution of English marriage."

"Indeed," I managed. _He knew._ _He knew I knew he knew. He knew everything_.

When would I be free of this terrifyingly intuitive family who could all see through me as clear as a pane of plate glass? Even Siger St. James, staring at me from his photograph of twenty years ago or more, seemed to know me in a frighteningly true and real manner.

"I know everything, I expect you realize," said Mycroft, lighting a cigar.

"I know you do," I said, patting my pockets somewhat frantically for a cigarette.

"Of course." Mycroft shifted in his seat. "Of course you do." He steepled his fat fingers into a triangle, only drawing a sickening parallel as to how different his brother's hands had once been – how full of grace and of honesty. "It was the curse – or Mr. St. James would call it the blessing – of the St. James men. I couldn't explain it. Perhaps it is a scientific tendency. I believe one Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna has looked into sexual inversion some, but without substantial success. I am not overly familiar with his works in any case. Are you, doctor?"

"No," I said, my voice still shaking. I was beginning to have the feeling I had once had, when this entire monstrous mess began, the feeling that every man in the crowd and out of it knew of what I had done.

"I think it would be unhealthy to view it the way you do," remarked Mycroft lightly. "I have had no little moral struggle with my brother myself."

"But it is the practice of boys – creatures of the colleges and the preparatory schools. It is not the practice of grown men."

"Well, it seems to have _become_ the practice of _certain_ grown men," Mycroft observed dryly.

"Sir, I will not remain here to be mocked –" I half rose, my hands shaking nearly as much as my voice now.

"No, no, I am sure you won't. Do not leave yet, doctor." With his cigar, the elder – the only – Holmes gestured for me to remain in my chair. "Not quite yet. I only wished to explain to you that I did realize."

"When?"

"I knew from the beginning. I knew it had to happen the minute I realized that his father was indeed Mr. St. James. It was bound to happen. I simply did not know with who. A man can only deny his nature for so long, Doctor Watson, and for my brother I believe the time simply came when he no longer could." Mycroft shrugged. "I do not know what moved you in him that he had not seen in others. There was a Victor Trevor – the only other close friend he ever had, during his years at university – and I don't see why it was not he. No, no, he was not the only close one. There was a Mr. Bertram Theophilus as well…perhaps he was your predecessor, doctor, now that I come to consider it. It is not impossible."

Mycroft sat back and seemed to weigh my merits. I could not say that I felt different from when I had met what relatives Mary still possessed, to have them critique and examine, weigh the pro of her new fiancé against the con of her new conquest. Only now I was trembling with guilt and the certainty that my crime was printed in red letters upon my shirtfront.

"Do not worry. Trust me, doctor, no man but I can tell."

"I –"

"You trusted my brother with your secret, and I would appreciate that same trust. Most good." Mycroft breathed in deeply, then leaned toward me as though to keep our conversation confidential, despite the obvious fact that no one else was present in the small stranger's room of the Diogenes Club. "All right. Sherlock traveled the world as a child, and he saw many things – I only called you here to ask you, why do you suppose it was you, and nothing else, only you, that evoked his nature?"

"I…" I did not know. "I have no idea, sir. But is that really why you called me here?"

"No. No, I believe it was really to tell you –" He gave a long pause. "To tell you…" With a weak smile, Mycroft Holmes added, "All is not lost. All is truly, truly, not lost."

I, however, have been well taught in the recognition of reality by one of the masters of this art. All is lost. I have no illusions about that.

_Here end the Hiatus Era diaries of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson._

_Nothing further is known._

1 This is totally inaccurate, being mere idle gossip. In fact, the inspiration for Dorian was the young poet John Gray, a good friend of Oscar Wilde's and a sometime lover.

2 A somewhat obscure reference to the ancient Italian comedy, or the _commedia de'll arte._ Fiornette, Vittoria, and Harlotta are all different common names for the stock character of the harlot, kept woman, or courtesan,


	26. A Fifth Explanation

**A New Explanation**

_**by Maxwell Gabriel Neiman the Second**_

How shocked I was to discover the first manuscripts! I am glad, now that they have been read, that a second manuscript has appeared. I know I need not explain so fully as I did the first two upon their publication, for these second manuscripts have already been perused at length by the world of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, and been unanimously declared authentic. I am very proud, almost as a father of his children, that it should be my findings that tell us of so many very crucial things.

Only a few years ago it was not common knowledge that Siger St. James, the infamous sodomite and socialite of the aesthetic circles of the late 1890s, sometimes rumored to be Oscar Wilde's true inspiration for Dorian Gray, was Holmes's true father. To own the truth, it had been brought up in scholarship circles before, because of the similarities between Holmes's alias (Sigerson) and St. James's Christian name (Siger) but the mere idea was laughed off, that a creature of such heart and feeling should give his seed to such an icon of asexuality and lack of emotion as Sherlock Holmes. Now, however, with further knowledge of what Doctor Watson referred to as the Master's great heart as well as great brain, we may say with perfect accuracy that they were indeed father and son, although not in any conventional moral sense, what with Holmes's peculiarly gypsy like childhood.

These second manuscripts are just as much a love story as the first, but they seem to have a degree of joy present that does not exist in the first, guilt ridden moral fables that they are. While the first diaries undoubtedly date from the period just after Holmes's "death," these date from a period long after his return, and recount the events thereof. Perhaps they are therefore more of a love story than the first, considering the element of happiness and self acceptance contained therein. Unfortunately, as Holmes told us in his first journals, love stories never end happily, and I am afraid this love story is no exception. It is a pity, that the world will never see Holmes truly blissfully in love as a man of his inwardly vulnerable nature could be, but this new manuscript is, I think, the closest we will come to it.


	27. The Sussex House

_Editor's Note: Holmes's opinions of Tibet and the Tibetan people are not necessarily those of Mr. Maxwell Gabriel Neiman._

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

**The Sussex House**

Tibet. March twenty-first of 1893.

Tibet is everything I expected it to be. Namely, it is ascetic and cold, full of yaks and very short men in saffron robes who eat nothing but rice and salted fish.

I have given up in my remembering. All I want now is to forget that I was ever near him. The memory holds itself close to me, like a friend, like a mother, like a lover, and will not release me until I embrace it in my turn. I am lying awake tonight in a sheepskin tent, where I dreamed happily until reality invaded my rest again. I dreamed of him, his brown eyes and sun-marked skin. My skin has tanned a miniscule amount. I glance at myself in mirrors and sometimes wonder who the hardy fellow is. I am hardly the pale wraith of yesteryear.

It is to want something impossible, what I feel now. Not to want, but to need. His skin on my skin. His eyes on my eyes. His hands dancing over the aching muscles on my back. His lips. The dazed way his eyes would seem after I kissed him, or he kissed me, or –

_Kissed. _Peculiar. I have never used the word before in this context. Certainly it looks foolish on the page. "I kissed Watson," or, "Watson kissed me," looks as though it ought to belong in a lady's diary, and besides, in that case, she would call him John, if they were properly in love.

I ought to sleep, and pray to whatever I do not believe in that my dreams will not be too full of the past.

Tibet. March twenty-second of 1891.

I dreamed disquietingly last night. It has been almost a week since I have been visited by old acquaintances in the land of Nod, but it seems Cain still makes his home there, to say nothing of his mischief, in that sleepy nightmarish land that lies east of Eden.

I dreamed about my family. I was walking over the Sussex downs, in this dream, and there was not a single man within a hundred miles. It must have been in one of the uncomfortable months between summer and fall, for the sun was shining vigorously, but it was still bitterly cold. I seemed to walk for a long time, over six or seven hills. After what seemed to be, in the strange way of time in dreams, some hours, I became aware of an emotion rare in me: Fear. What if I fell? Who would catch me? What if I was hurt and could not move again? There would be no one here to see me. And if they did, would they bother to go and get help?

In the way of a dream, I could see myself outside myself, one tall black column on the white gold downs. I looked as though I might be the only human being in the world.

On the horizon, then, in the dream, I could see the house I had spent my boyhood in. I cannot remember that time as a happy one. Indeed, I once had an Aunt who remarked to me in a hushed voice, "You must live the most miserable life as ever there was on earth, boy."

Everyone in my family called me boy and nothing else, perhaps because the title fitted me so well. I was scrawny and ungainly. I spent much of my time climbing trees with book in hand, going swimming just after eating, and getting into fights with boys I thought behaved unjustly. Mycroft was always Mycroft, not boy, even when he was as young as ten. I did not share my worried aunt's awed concern. My life was my life. There was, as far as I knew, nothing else. Later, I was to realize that there are families in the world where the father is not called sir by his children, but father. Still, as a child, I cannot recall being either happy or unhappy with my family. I simply was. When I was alone, I was happy.

Regardless of all this though, in the dream, I thought that house must have been the warmest, best place in the world for a man to be. With a little boyish cry of happiness deep in the back of my throat, I redoubled my pace.

The door was the same, a great oak leviathan that I had to shove with all my strength before it would give even the slightest bit. In reality, I suppose, if I went back to that place, the door would come open with ease, but in the dream, I did not seem to have grown in size or strength. The half remembered smell of that great brown study of a house had not changed either. The air was still stale and musty, stifling for a small boy who itched for greater things, despite not knowing what they constituted. The carpet must once have been rich, when my father's father had been young. I would have sunk into it up to my bony ankles, then, but now it only prickled at the soles of my shoes. I surveyed the huge front hallway. It had not changed at all. The same paintings adorned the slightly rotting wallpaper.

There was the portrait of the family. Sherrinford Holmes, nearly so much of a leviathan as our front door, and as difficult to move, stood over the settee on which my mother and her children sat. He was glowering at us like some gloomy male version of the Irish bean sidhe, about to pronounce our deaths.

My mother looked fantastically lovely, as she always had. Perhaps the dream only made her beauty more unearthly. Looking at the portrait, I loved her, but perhaps it was because the dream was a dream, after all, and not reality, or perhaps it was because she was dead, in any case. The painting was a painting. She could not make things difficult anymore.

The knife like face that is ugly and incongruous on me was unconventional and fascinating on her. She looked sharp and intelligent in a way few other women I have ever seen have. Mycroft and I were seated next to her, one on either side, as though to guard her from the great gargantuan lump of austerity that was my father. Mycroft stared out from the portrait out of heavy lidded eyes, half hooded and laden with utter boredom. I hardly looked suited for a guard, skinny and awkward, not yet grown into my spindly limbs, from which enormous hands and feet foolishly dangled. I am not certain I have ever really grown into my body since then. In the portrait, in the dream, there was a certain desperate earnestness to my eyes that almost alarms me.

Everything was just the same, in the Sussex house in the dream. I could even hear the tinny harpsichord sounds of Mycroft playing, and my mother singing the songs she loved. They were always archaic and strange to our ears. Elizabethan, if she felt at all modern, and further and further back if she was being obstinate. "_Here's a health to the king and a lasting peace," _she was fluting sweetly, the mannish words lying unbecomingly in her perfect mouth, "_and he who will this health deny, down, down, down, down, down among the dead men let him lie…"_

In the dream, Sherrinford Holmes was there.

"Hello," I said to him. There was really nothing more for me to say.

"Boy," he greeted me, monosyllabic as he had ever been. "Come in and see your mother."

"Yes, sir," came out of my mouth from old habits I had not known I had retained. And if I was unaware of those habits, what else had gone unnoticed in the shadowy regions inside myself? Regions I had never perused? How strange dreams are, in that suddenly one knows the questions one must ask. "Sir, might I inquire as to something?"

"You already have, boy," he grunted. "No redundancies when you speak to me." This from a man who would make the same move five or six times in a game of mental chess. (I never told him so, mainly because of an excellent inherent survival instinct.)

"Am I to take that to mean that I may?"

"Don't be pert, boy."

As a child, I would never have dared to act so childish as I did in that dream. "Sorry, sir." A long silence blossomed there. I let it grow.

"If you have a question, you ought to ask it. Then go in to see your mother. She's very anxious to speak with you, as always."

"As always, sir." I nodded. "May I ask you, though…"

"Yes, so I said."

"I. I have called myself Sigerson. As an alias."

"Yes."

"Siger's. Son. The son of Siger."

"Yes. Well, you could hardly call yourself Sherrinfordson."

The Sussex house was silent, then, in the dream.

"You believe that Siger St. James was your father, you mean," said Sherrinford Holmes.

I did not reply.

"Well, you're correct, you know."

I shrugged. "Of course I am. I always am."

"Not always, I think you'll find. Go in and see your mother."

And, in the dream, I did.

But before I tell you of the dream, need I expound upon the identity of Mr. Sigerson St. James? He was the man my mother left Sherrinford Holmes for. I was fourteen at the time. He had been her lover for more years than I could count. He said he was an accountant, assisting mother with her figures, but he could not have been less of one. Indeed, I found out later that he had only spent two years in a very second rate grammar school before being thrown out for gross indecency. Nowadays, one hardly needs to mention Siger St. James's whole name before he is recognized in fashionable London society, or so I am told. He is hardly young any more, but it does not really matter nowadays, when youth can be bought in the same way as jewels or a newspaper. Siger St. James is like the Dorian Gray of the real world, complete with sodomitical practices and hedonism. He succeeds in every excess. There never was a creature more amoral, more fantastic, more demonic, and more completely charming. If I have put my genius into my work, my father put his into his wildly successful life.

In the dream, my mother was lying limply on the settee, no longer singing, though a thumb piano lay not a few inches from her hand on the coffee table. "Hello, boy," she said affectionately.

"Hello, mother," I said, my voice a little stiff.

"Don't be positively horrid, dear darling boy. Come over here and pet my hair like you used to when you were a small darkling."

"Mother, I came here for a reason."

"What reason, pet?"

"Father asked me to come in and speak with you."

"I'm sure he did. You know, you needn't call him father any longer."

"I know," said I. "But I -"

"What, boy?"

"Isn't there some reason I ought to be here?"

"I'm sure there is, love. Think. And sit down, while you're pondering the mysteries of the universe." My mother's hair was down, and she was smiling, in the dream.

I settled myself upon an armchair far away from her, and asked her once again. "Mother, why am I here?"

She shrugged. "Needed to speak with you. I thought you ought to be getting home, my love."

"I am home. Sussex is certainly home. This is where my father's father grew up. Or, rather, where Mycroft's father's father grew up…"

"Exactly. Your home – your father, for that matter - is somewhere entirely other." Mother reached out behind her head, to the sofa's arm, where there was a box of chocolates, and slipped one between her pink lips.

"But I -"

"Do not suggest that you loved it here. Lying boy!"

There was silence, then, in the dream. I did not know that I was expected to speak, but my mother apparently thought so, for she rose in a fury, overturning the confection box. We were both peppered with chocolate covered cherries, toffees and caramels, as she roared at me, "You thick headed imbecile, Baker Street! Number two hundred and twenty-one Baker Street, upper floor, first door on the right! How can you think anywhere else was your home? How could you be happy anywhere else? You fool! You fool! You silly silly boy!" And she fell upon me with a couch cushion, jabbing furiously at me, but in the way of dreams she could not touch me, and fell straight through.

Now that I am awake I marvel at my accuracy in recreating my mother. Her tantrums were not only furious, but utterly unpredictable, and stuff of family legend.

When she had composed herself on the armchair again, her mussed hair the only sign that she had ever had her burst of temper, she began to lecture me as only a mother can. My mother, being younger and prettier than most, did not exactly have as much of the upper hand in this facility as she would have had she been a mature, stern, gray haired lady of sixty with a cameo pin and spectacles, but she was proficient at it nonetheless.

"You know, boy, if you're always going to destroy the decent things in your life, then whatever is the point of your getting them at all? It is really entirely silly. I mean, for pity's sake, go back to him, being with him isn't going to kill you, and after all, love, he's only a man, and I've had plenty of those, and believe me, they are quite malleable under the right circumstances. I just wish you wouldn't be so very odd about it all. You _could_ have just fallen in love with him from the start, but oh no, you couldn't be too much like your father, my dear dear little rebellious boy. I shall call you Robespierre. No, no I shan't, it would give you ideas." She paused, her little mouth hanging coquettishly open. "What was I telling you, boy?"

"Something about the malleable qualities of men, mother." She was never able to detect sarcasm in life. Apparently, dead and in my dreams, she is no different.

"Oh, yes!" Mother grinned triumphantly, in a manner most unladylike. "You ought to go back."

"So you say. But mother -"

"Yes, boy?" She was calm now, totally calm, leaning over to take the thumb piano in her lap. With one errant finger, she picked out the notes to an old air that I seemed to almost know.

"You said that I could have fallen in love with him from the start. I couldn't have -"

"_Cold blows the wind today my love…_Of course you could have, boy, don't be a fool…_And gently drops the rain…"_

"Mother, please attend."

"Sing with me."

"I haven't sung since the church choir in Italy…you remember, when we wintered there…"1

"Sing with me."

I knew the song, in the way one knows things in dreams, and besides, it was an old song, one she would sing to me when I was small. The Unquiet Grave, it was called. Appropriate for my mother and I, all things entirely considered.

"_I never had but one sweetheart," _I managed in my unreliable tenor. It seemed to be cracking again, in the dream, as though I were a boy of twelve. "_And in greenwood she lies slain."_

My mother joined me. "_And in greenwood she lies slain…_You know, boy," she remarked parenthetically, "what you mentioned earlier. About love. It's the silliest thing I've ever heard. And with your father about, not to mention Siger, I've heard some fair to middling silly things."

"What?"

"That sodomites don't fall in love. Pish tush."

"It isn't -"

"Oh, for heaven's sakes," my mother snapped, "it damn well is, and you know it is too, boy."

"I -"

"_I'll do as much for my true love as any young man may…I'll sit and mourn all at -"_

_­_"But mother, I -"

"Oh, for the sake of Saint Agnes, boy, shut up!" Mother howled at me, her long hair becoming yet more mussed. "Shut up, hush! You know what you are, and you know your heart! I ought not to have to helped you, you know."

"For the sake of Saint Agnes? I thought you weren't a Catholic any longer."

"I'm dead," my mother pointed out, not incorrectly. "I can hardly be a Catholic or a Protestant of a Jew or anything at all, can I? They're all based on what happens when you die. I've done that already." I could not argue with that. "In any case, the point comes down to this. You ought to go home."

"But I _can't."_

"You certainly _can._ Don't you think a person can be with another one without losing himself? God cursed me with a stupid son."

"I am many things, mother, but I flatter myself stupid is not one of them!"

"Oh, yes it is." She jabbed at me with the index finger of one of her small hands. "Yes. It. _Is._ If it weren't, you'd know that there's absolutely nothing to stop you from going on home."

"There certainly is!"

"Oh, and what in heaven's name is that?" My mother graced me with a childish, unladylike roll of her eyes.

"My life is in danger, and you are well aware of the remnants of Britain's largest criminal organization –"

"Don't be a fool," she snapped again. "There's only Moran left, in any case."

"One of the most dangerous men in London -"

"So says your almighty index," she lashed out venomously. "And what are you going to do? Wait until Moran grows old and dies, and you do too?"'

The idea was suddenly not unappealing. "I might."

"NO!" She actually stamped her foot for effect, the vibration knocking the unfortunate thumb piano to the lushly carpeted floor. "No! No! No! Why can't you just live with your life as it is, you silly, silly boy! You are always trying to change things so that they will be just exactly right! When will you realize that they are? Or, rather, were, before you went and played your silly, silly games with them! They absolutely were!"

And then her face turned bright red, and there seemed to be a halo on my head, burning me with all the divine light that I never believed in, and then it disappeared, and I woke up cold, cold, cold, the coldest I have ever been, wanting desperately to feel a warm body next to mine, his arms wrapped around me, my head fitting underneath his chin, like the inevitable two pieces of a child's jigsaw puzzle that fit only with each other and not with the rest of the box.

I woke up frightened at the new knowledge that crept about the edges of my brain, the way the memories of my mother always had. The fear, though, kept me sharp and alert, and reminded me to be aware I was indeed afraid, so that perhaps I might overcome it. I believed perhaps I had done the impossible. Perhaps I had fallen in love, the one thing I have always believed I could not do.

I have not dreamed of the Sussex house since that night, but whenever I feel a doubt that I do indeed need desperately to return to England, I think of my mother's furious face, and the quiet austerity of the man I once thought to be my father, and I realize I have entities other than myself to consider.

I have no other choice.

Tomorrow I shall wire Mycroft with the news, and also ask for money. I seem to be in constant need of it.

But I digress.

Truly, I am going home.

1 Holmes and his mother seem to have spent some time in Italy. There is no evidence that either Mycroft Holmes, Siger St. James, or Sherrinford Holmes was present during this time.


	28. The Little Boys Found

**From the Post Hiatus Writings of Doctor John Hamish Watson**

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

**The Little Boys Found**

It was the only time in my life that I had ever fainted. I cannot say that I remembered if I dreamed while I lay there, unconscious in my armchair, but I do remember the face that swam before my eyes only moments before they closed and I lay there at the mercy of whatever might come. It was Holmes's face, of course, exactly as I remembered it and yet somehow still utterly foreign. The gray eyes were just the same, bright and sharp and eager as they had always been, but there were new lines about them, and about his mouth, creased and deep. He looked older, and in that split second I wondered if I seemed older to him as well. Then I realized he was dead, and, as it seemed the only appropriate and gentlemanly thing to do considering the circumstances, I fainted.

When I woke, a few minutes later, I sat there and simply stared at him, making my best effort to grapple with the unreality of it all. I had dreamed of him, while he was gone, long, drawn out dreams, some dreams that frightened me and some that shamed me and some that filled me with too much joy to have room left for shame. These dreams, though, were only dreams, and a hundred times more terrible than any nightmare, for when I woke it was cold and the bed was still as empty as before. He was still gone. Still dead. Dead again. And so, of course, was she. I was alone. This had to be a dream as well, for Holmes to stand before me alive and thriving. There was no other way for it to be possible, that he was standing there, holding my hands in his, smiling nervously at me like a child afraid to be scolded. I had forgotten how solid his hands could be. When Mary had died, her hands had been less solid and tangible than the hands of a ghost, but Holmes, returned from the dead, had hands that were solid and honest. He might not tell me his secrets, but holding his hands in mine, I knew them all.

"Hello," he said, that well remembered tenor voice shaking like a leaf in the wind. "Hello, doctor."

"But who…how…"

"I…oh dear. I'm sorry." Holmes – excuse me, the impossible dream creature that could not by any stretch of the imagination be Holmes – collapsed into an armchair across from mine, one hand thrown over his face in what might have been despair, might have been remorse – indeed, might even have been amusement. "I _am_ sorry." Somewhere in the back of my mind I recognized that Holmes had only apologized to me once before. "I am so very sorry. You –"

"Holmes…" My shell shocked brain was beginning to put the happenings of the past few moments together in some at least vaguely or mildly coherent fashion. "How…you…You're dead," I pointed out with utmost astuteness.

"No," he said weightily, almost as though he were a Catholic at confession. "No, plainly I am not."

"But you fell into that monstrous chasm!"

To my surprise, Holmes laughed, and his laughter filled the air with a quality I suddenly found that I had missed enormously. "I did not fall, Watson. No, my dear, dear fellow, I never fell in there. The late Professor Moriarty practically engineered his own suicide by arranging to meet me there, of all places, at all times. He was an old mathematics scholar, Watson, a strong, evil and bitterly tenacious old mathematics scholar, but an old mathematics scholar nonetheless. And I – well." His smile! Oh God, the way he smiled! How could I not have remembered such a thing in the crisp, sharp detail in which it was now placed before me? "I was very young. Well, it has only been three years, and I still _am_ very young, I suppose, by that reckoning. But I was younger then. Far younger, in my heart and in my head."

Then he gazed straight at me, with all the disarming earnestness that had charmed me so much so many years before, and he smiled. "I was never in that chasm. It never claimed me, but there were other dangers, and copious ones. Come with me, and I shall explain."

I am sure I shall never forget that walk through London, the most profound feeling of déjà vu I have ever experienced, as we strode through the streets the way we had so many times so many years before, he speaking quickly and sensibly about some crime, I listening earnestly and trying my best to understand and assist him as best I could. It was as though he had never left, almost as though we were back in the days of the adventures of the speckled band and the Drebber murder. Ah, the Drebber murder! Good days, when we were still learning the nuances of each other's conversation, habits, and laughter…I could hardly remember, anymore, when the nature of our friendship had changed to love, simply because it had not seemed to change…

Love. I have written love. I cannot in good conscience write the word in conjunction with a man. It does not happen. It cannot happen.

It has happened.

He is lying in the bed of my old rooms at Baker Street now, asleep and resting as he says he has not rested in three long years. And I am sitting and writing once more of my friend. I knew it from the moment his hand touched my face again. We stood in the doorway, the old familiar doorway of 221 Baker Street, God bless it, and simply fell into each other, like a house of cards that had finally stopped resisting the pull of gravity. I remember this, I thought. I remember the scent of him, shag tobacco and gunpowder, I remember the way his mouth is on mine, I remember the contours of his face. There was so much I swore I had forgotten.

I had not.

I am a moral man, and a sensible man, and I know that men do not fall in love. At least, not with each other. With women, certainly. But I cannot deny what I feel. Can I go against what is essentially a matter of personal taste? I am not an invert. I have never felt inclined this way before I met him, and even after I met him it took months, years, for us to realize the true nature of our affections.

His hands, running deftly over me, have told me the truth. I love him. It is horrid and sordid, a commonplace problem, certainly not a three piper, simply a reality and a foolish one.

But it is a reality nevertheless.


	29. Catullus and Molecules

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

**Catullus and Molecules**

How, how, how was I so foolish as to expect to come back here and return to life as it had always been, with the game afoot and the revolver at the ready, and to the devil with the consequences?

I must be mad. I followed him in the streets all day, as though I were Leather Apron1 or some other murderer stalking my newest prey, and I never once revealed myself to him. I could have sent a letter, or even a dramatically terse telegram (Watson STOP Am alive STOP Will be returning to you shortly STOP SH STOP) but God, God, has my theatrical past caught up with me in the most dreadfully ironic way possible. For the second smartest man in London, my dear brother being the first, I am really remarkably stupid. (_Exactly what your mother said, _a tiny part of my brain whispers. I do my best to ignore it, though I do not succeed. I do not mind being wrong so much as I mind other people being right

This theatrical flair will be the death of me, to say nothing of my dearest friend. He is lying here as I write this, slumped on the chair, fainted from shock. At first I made as if to wake him, chafe his wrists or splash water on his face, but when I saw him lying there I did not know what to do but allow him to quietly sleep on, like a wax figure, or a child's toy soldier, paint uniform cracking to reveal the silvery tin beneath, because it had been cast away, or left behind, or lost. It was my fault.

He ought to have known. Who else would, disguised as a little old bookseller, hand him a copy of Catullus? _Catullus?_ For pity's sake. Catullus is, in the name of all that is holy, greener than the greenest carnation. But still, my dear friend had thought me dead. One must make allowances.

Have I lost him forever now? Will he never again allow me near him? The thought a few months ago would have filled me with relief. I would not have had to return to my true home, would not have had to face myself. It was – it _is ­– _my father that they have called the real Dorian Gray, but I fell as though I am that particular entity, just forced to gaze upon my portrait. I am looking my dark reflection in the face now, at his world with a gap in it that was once my presence. I am ashamed at having created it.

Watson really is a sight for sore eyes. He does not look at all well, but he does look infinitely human, and infinitely familiar, and I am infinitely grateful to see him. One only realizes how much one needs someone until one is away from them, and one never realizes how much one has missed them until after one sees them once more.

I do not even want to touch him, I am beginning to realize. I cannot think of anything I want at all. For three years, I have been apart from him. I am content now just to look at him in all his unintentional, disheveled glory. It has been many years since I have had faith in any benevolent God, but now I find myself ready to fall on my knees and pray before a Lord that has let me live, live and return to my friend. My Boswell, my chronicler, and my friend.

**The above was written, in the editor's opinion, somewhat later on.**

_In the absence of other stimulation, chemical molecules will dissolve into one another._

It was one of the first things I learned from my tutors as a small child fascinated with chemistry, and it abruptly left my mind as soon as it entered it, in the way of things one learns when one is very young. It always, though, had a habit of hanging lurkingly about the back of my mind, and once or twice a year I tended to pull it out so that I might consider it for some experiment or other. Never, however, did I see it so well expressed as when I stood in the doorway of my erstwhile residence, the poor doctor indecisively fretting himself into a Hamlet like heap.

As it had been on that night so many years before, all I can really remember feeling was exhaustion and relief. Only that. No wild, maddening lust. Shocking, I know, that I was only deeply, crushingly tired. Tired of going to bed alone at night, and of waking in the morning to see that still I remained alone, perhaps even more alone than I had been before. I was tired enough not to care what happened in those moments, and as a consequence it was all very unromantic and not a little embarrassing.

Perhaps it was my hand that brushed over his as I reached for the doorknob, or perhaps it was the the friction between our arms as he slipped his out of mine. I do not remember reaching out. I only remember falling, the easy effortless feeling of falling into someone that I knew I could and would always trust.

I cannot possibly explain with words the effect seeing him once more had upon me. He was the same, just the same, familiar and simple and yet full of endless complexity. And yet now it was so much the better, to see him once more after missing him for what now seemed like such a lifetime of years. But I had not allowed myself to miss him properly then, perhaps because I knew that if I did I would only return to England in the time of two heartbeats, and I missed him now. All that grief and loss and misery had locked itself up within me, and now that I saw him again, he became the catalyst that converted them from grief to joy. Joy in its purest form is not an active thing. It is a decidedly passive one, that one allows to flow over one and that one simply experiences.

I stood contentedly beneath the arch of my old Baker Street residence. I have often heard it said that the best part of a journey is one's homecoming, and my own return to my rooms in Baker Street has only confirmed this saying. I was mildly miffed to discover that some things had indeed been moved in my long absence – Mycroft had apparently seen fit to move my pipes into an actual pipe rack as opposed to the dear old coal scuttle, which has served me so wisely and well over the years, and a book of photographs from my dubiously innocent years had been spirited quietly away o'er the airy mountain and down the rushy glen by certain little men with the initials M.H.2 – but nevertheless 221B remained 221B, Mrs. Hudson remained Mrs. Hudson, if a slightly alarmed Mrs. Hudson, and Dr. Watson, thank heaven, remained Dr. Watson.

"You know," he remarked, "it's rather good to see you back."

It was the first time he had mentioned it, and we both laughed at that, that it was even possible that those words had gone so long simply implied.

"I rather think it's good to be back, you know," I retorted cheerfully, and we both began to laugh twice as hard as we ever had before, perhaps simply because there was nothing else to do, no other way to have any sort of communion. _Communion._ Perhaps the thing that I had missed the most. There was one other thing to do, of course, but neither of us wanted to shatter the calm.

Somehow, though, after the laughter was gone and the vacuum in the air remained like an endless hall of mirrors, reflecting the silence back at us, two molecules, in the absence of outside stimulation, dissolved into each other.

In retrospect, I believe I came to him. It was only three steps across the doorframe to touch his shoulder, and then it did not seem to matter what would happen. Silently, in the soft whisper of an evening fog, I leaned my head into the comfortable curve of his neck and shoulder. Oh, how I had missed it! It was somehow shocking to know that he was still there, still the same, still as finely made and clear and true as he had always been, and I could only fall into him, falling further and further, afraid to drown, but even more afraid to stay, shivering, on the shore. My mouth found his, and –

"Holmes!"

"Mmm?"

"Holmes, we're in plain public view…"

"To hell with plain public view."

"I would just as soon not have us both arrested."

"_Have _us arrested?" I pressed my nose into his hair. It smelled the same. Tobacco and, for some insane, unfathomable medical reason, iodine.

His hands pressed into the small of my back. "_Not_ have us arrested, I said."

"Ah. I must say, that makes much more sense." I paused and fumbled desultorially for the doorknob. "All right, fine, I cannot deny the accuracy of your point."

"I certainly hope not…hello, didn't I just say stop it?"

"Fine," I replied, mockingly miffed, and removed my hand from under his shirt collar. "Watson, stop talking. For pity's sake, my dear old fellow, let's please get out of plain public view."

"It is an executive decision, after all. Remember, despite your having gone on indefinite leave for three years with everyone thinking you were dead – regardless of that – Holmes, don't do that, I said, it makes me lose my train of thought – I am only the junior partner in this agency." I did not see his ironic smile, but I felt it against my cheek.

"You are two years older than I," I made a point of reminding him, shoving him bodily through the door.

"Regardless," he retorted, attempting without success to hang his hat on the peg.

"Hmm. Regardless, you say? Well, yes, it's true, you are indeed the junior partner, if by junior you mean –" My sense of humor will never cease to humiliate me.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, stop talking. Come _on._ There are only seventeen steps, as you have so often intelligently pointed out. Now who's being obstinate?"

"I don't know."

"Well, yes, that's hardly unusual." He smirked at me, and I suddenly had a keen awareness of what it would be like to be John Hamish Watson.

"Oh, harken to the good doctor."

"But what is it exactly this time around that you don't know about?"

"It's that…why, it has been a long time since I said I didn't know." It had, too. I had thought it for most of the three years abroad, but I had never said so.

"You might benefit from admitting it more often," he

"_Saying_ it more often," I protested.

"_Admitting_ it more often."

"Saying."

"_Admitting," _the doctor insisted, and stepped sharply on my toes.

"Ah! Ah. All right, admitting, admitting, admitting!"

"Much better." He leaned back against the wall and coolly crossed his arms. Disquietingly enough, he reminded me of…me. "Now, what would you like to admit you don't know about?"

"Ah. Ecclesiastes, really." I replied evasively. "Leviticus, I have made up my mind about, I think."

"Really?"

"Indeed. I have come to a satisfactory conclusion."

"So have I."

"What might yours be?"

"I'll tell you tomorrow morning."

"Why?"

"Because my opinion on Leviticus will be significantly affected by the events I expect to transpire between now and tomorrow morning."

For a moment, I was rather nervous at the prospect of my performance (or perhaps lack thereof) being critiqued, but then I saw his smirk again, and the undeniably mischievous glint in his brown eyes. "Pawky humor again, Watson," I berated him. "Pawky humor."

"Look, _please_ stop talking."

"No," I said, and the word was sad and strange in my mouth.

Watson looked at me, hurt, and I ruefully tried to take it back. "It is only…"

"Only what?" He was truly frowning now, joy turned to hurt and then metamorphosing once more into anger. "Only _what? _Did you find some lovely lady somewhere in Vienna or – or some equally lovely man?"

"No!" I heard my voice becoming louder, and frantically, I quieted myself. "No. No, truly, no. It is only…Mary."

His face was like a tombstone, as devoid of expression as it was of cheer. "Dead," he said, and his voice sounded like the meaning of the word.

"I know. I heard. I heard when it happened. I very nearly –" I almost admitted it, then. "I almost –" And then I did. "I very nearly almost came back." I was stuttering like a schoolboy. This, then, was love.

He stared at me, seeming half shocked. It almost offended me, that he should be so surprised that I would feel anything at all. "Is that so surprising? Is that really such a terrifyingly unreal thing? _Hath not a Jew eyes?__3_Are you so amazed?_" _I demanded bitterly.

For a long time, neither of us said a word. I reexamined the annex of number 221 for what felt as though it might be the five hundredth time. The walls were scratched and stained, some from Mrs. Hudson's occasional rare bouts of clumsiness, some from our own debatably wise episodes. There, there, where black vulcanized rubber had scuffed the wall sconce, Jefferson Hope had pressed one foot in his frantic struggle to avoid the police forces. There, at my eye level, the good Inspector Lestrade had once tapped out his pipe on the coat rack just before getting a decidedly furious glare from Mrs. Hudson, upon which occasion he promptly ceased to even glance at his pipe while at the estimable address of 221B. There, just at the level of my bony right ankle, Watson had accidentally nearly cracked off the sole of one of his shoes, and there by the gaslight high on the wall I had once, through an extremely odd set of circumstances which I shall not recount here, stained the wallpaper with acid.

"No," he answered me finally, "no." At which point he finally saw fit to kiss me properly.

1 The press's original nickname for Jack the Ripper, before the Dear Boss letter appeared in newspapers, signed Jack the Ripper.

2 A rather odd, totally out of context, and completely incongruous William Allingham quote. The original stanza runs, "Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen/We daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men."

3 A reference to one of Shylock's most famous speeches in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."


End file.
